نوآوری در فن آوری در یک نظام چند قطبی: تجزیه و تحلیل و پیامدها برای سیاست ایالات متحده

This paper analyzes recent data on the “globalization” of industrial R&D, emphasizing that the patterns of international R&D investments differ significantly among industries, and seem to differ among different activities within the innovation process. I distinguish among the creation of new technologies (often identified with invention), the development of these inventions into commercially attractive products, and the production and marketing of these new products. None of these activities is well measured within industrial economies, and our measures of their international dimensions are even less reliable. The available evidence on trends in each of these three activities suggests that the most significant increases in “internationalization” have taken place in the exploitation of new technologies, largely as a by-product of increased crossborder direct investment in production activities. But at least some evidence indicates that much of the technology creation activities of large firms remains concentrated in their home economies. Nevertheless, the structure of activity in technology development and exploitation resembles the pattern of trade in industrial manufactured products—increased specialization in specific technologies or innovative activities that relies on a supportive national infrastructure and innovation system, combined with declining costs of communication and crossnational investment. As a result, intrafirm and interfirm networks for the support of innovation are developing rapidly throughout the world. The growth of these networks is one of many indicators of the development of a “multipolar” science and technology system in the world economy.

The “internationalization,” “globalization,” or “multinationalization” in the national distribution of industrial R&D activity, citing only a few of the many terms for the phenomenon, has received a great deal of attention from various expert groups and scholars during the past 20 years. Two of the most recent studies are those by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment [1] and the National Academy of Engineering [2], and literally dozens of academic studies of this topic have been published. The bibliography in the recent NAE study covers 12 pages of text in very small type. Like many other topics of debate within the scholarly and policy communities, however, discussion of this phenomenon continues to produce controversy as often as it yields consensus. The debates are fueled by the rapid pace of change in the technology and the organization of innovation within many U.S. and foreign industries, as well as by change in the broader global economy that has produced new competitors and new opportunities. The terms of the domestic debate over the desirability of international R&D have undergone at least three broad shifts in the past 25 years. U.S. firms' increased investments in offshore R&D during the 1960s sparked expressions of concern over the loss of employment and other technological opportunities associated with the domestic performance of R&D. This discussion was part of a broader debate over the benefits and costs to U.S. citizens of the expanding international activities of U.S.-headquartered multinationals, in which some participants argued that the private interests of U.S. multinationals no longer coincided with those of U.S. citizens. Beginning in the early 1980s, as flows of foreign investment into the United States grew rapidly, and this economy became an important host nation for foreign-owned enterprises, concerns were expressed that such investments created employment opportunities only in low-wage, low-skill assembly operations, and did not bring with them the “high value-added” activities of R&D and innovation. Most recently (captured in some of the discussion in the 1994 OTA report cited earlier), policymakers have expressed concern that foreign-owned enterprises invest in R&D within the United States as a means of “cherry-picking” the fruits of U.S. R&D, especially publicly financed basic research in U.S. universities, and that such foreign investments are a conduit for the export of technological advances and economic opportunities from the United States to foreign economies. This most recent debate cites differences among the “national innovation systems” of the industrial economies of the OECD and newly industrializing economies, suggesting that asymmetries in U.S. and foreign firms' access to the technologies developed in one another's home economies creates disadvantages for U.S. firms. This brief survey cannot begin to cover the array of issues raised by the increasing international interactions in R&D and other technology-development activities. Instead, I hope to sketch out some of the complexities of current phenomena, noting that the pattern and implications of such interactions seem to differ significantly among industries, and seem to differ among different activities within the innovation process. Extending the work of Archibugi and Michie [3], one can distinguish among the creation of new technologies (often identified with invention), the development of these inventions into commercially attractive products, and the production and marketing of these new products. None of these activities is well measured within industrial economies, and our measures of their international dimensions are even less reliable. R&D investment, for example, spans both the creation and the development of new technologies, and in many cases is associated as well with the exploitation of these technologies (as in the case of “localization” of new products for specific offshore markets). The available evidence on trends in each of these three activities suggests that the most significant increases in “internationalization” have taken place in the exploitation of new technologies, largely as a by-product of increased crossborder direct investment in production activities. But at least some evidence indicates that much of the technology creation activities of large firms remains concentrated in their home economies. Nevertheless, the structure of activity in technology development and exploitation resembles the pattern of trade in industrial manufactured products—increased specialization in specific technologies or innovative activities that relies on a supportive national infrastructure and innovation system, combined with declining costs of communication and crossnational investment. As a result, intrafirm and interfirm networks for the support of innovation are developing rapidly throughout the world. The growth of these networks is one of many indicators of the development of a “multipolar” science and technology system in the world economy, in which technological expertise is distributed far more widely among the United States and other industrial and industrializing economies. A second important trend is the significant growth in inward R&D investment in the U.S. economy, which appears to have grown much more rapidly during the past 15 years than U.S. outward R&D investment. Whereas large U.S. firms' outward R&D investments dominated the analysis and discussion of this phenomenon in the 1960s and early 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s have been characterized by significant inward investment in R&D from foreign sources. From a global point of view, the tendency of crossborder investments in R&D to be highly localized and focused on specific technological capabilities and competences means that international differences in these capabilities and in the infrastructure supporting them are likely to endure, rather than being eliminated by such investments. Although the contrasting structure of the U.S. and other economies' national innovation systems assuredly plays a role in the pace, direction, and distribution of benefits from these flows of R&D investment, structural change in these national innovation systems is neither rapid nor responsive to government policies. Finally, the U.S. policy posture toward these changing circumstances needs to proceed from the premise that the rapid and efficient adoption by U.S. firms of new technologies from foreign or domestic sources, rather than their creation, is the primary source of economic benefit (see the [4] for a recent analysis of this issue). Indeed, this issue underlines a continuing tension in technology policy between the interests of U.S. firms seeking a nationalistic technology policy and those of U.S. citizens, including other U.S. firms.

The problems and tensions resulting from the creation of a multipolar technological environment are legacies of success. A sustained position of U.S. technological and economic hegemony such as existed in 1945 would have been neither economically nor politically desirable or stable. The globalization of R&D and the growth of technological capabilities in firms and economies throughout the world rest on remarkable postwar record of economic reconstruction and growth in the industrial and industrializing economies that was a central goal of U.S. foreign policy for much of the postwar era. This success sprang from a number of sources, not all of them originating in the United States; but the U.S. architects of the policy recognized the critical importance for national interests of continued U.S. engagement in international economic and political reconstruction, and were willing as well to take the long view in calculating the balance of costs and benefits for U.S. interests. Although the economic and policy environment of the next 50 years will differ significantly from that of the 1945–1995 period, this approach to policy remains relevant and desirable.