Introduction

During the Kennedy administration, Herbert Hollomon had conducted an extensive review of the federal role in technological innovation. Despite the review, as he told Congress a decade and a half later, it was “other nations [that] began to understand and appreciate the importance of innovation and to perceive R.&D. as only one part of the complex process required to bring the new into practical and widespread use” (U.S. Senate 1979b: 19). Hollomon believed the United States had failed to adopt this attitude because of its hegemonic postwar position, which by the time of his testimony it had begun to lose to the aggressiveness of these foreign nations.

As policy scholar Harvey Averch (1985: 43) has argued, “The framers of the post-World War II ‘contract’ between the federal government and the scientific and technical community felt little concern about an innovation problem.” Complacency about the productivity of science was akin to that about the integrity of science – it was assumed to be an automatic function.