Continuing Innovation in Information Technology (2012) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Key Lessons About the Nature of Research in Information Technology
Key Lessons About the Nature of Research in Information Technology
Pages 9-15
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From page 9... ...
. THE ESSENTIAL ROLE OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT Innovation in IT is made possible by a complex ecosystem encompassing university and industrial research enterprises, emerging start-up and more mature technology companies, those that finance innovative firms, and the regulatory environment and legal frameworks in which innovation takes place.12 It was within this ecosystem that the enabling technologies for each of the IT industries illustrated in Figure 1 were created.
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2-4. biomedical computing; and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity invests in such areas as data analysis and speech translation.17 Today, a wide array of agencies participate in the federal Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD)
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SOURCE: Adapted from NRC/CSTB, 2009, Assessing the Impacts of Changes in the Information Technology R&D Ecosystem, The National Academies Press, Washington, D.C. One of the most important messages of Figure 1 is the long, unpredictable incubation period -- requiring steady work and funding -- between initial exploration and commercial deployment.
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architecture.24 The VLSI Design program also supported university research that gave rise to such companies as Cadence Design Systems, Synopsys, and Mentor Graphics, which acquired dozens of smaller companies that started as spin-offs of DARPA-funded25 university research and today are part of a multibillion-dollar electronic design automation industry that is an essential enabler of other IT industries. Similarly, although IBM pioneered the concept of relational databases (the System R project)
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From page 13... ...
, for querying databases; • Multimedia technologies, including techniques for compressing audio and video, which support streaming or downloaded content; • Graphical Web browsers, which made Internet services accessible to general users and across a wide range of hardware and software platforms; • Search engines, including indexing, query interfaces, and spiders that build indexes of Web content; • Data mining, which allows patterns to be inferred and relevant data to be identified from very large data sets; • Improved understanding of human-computer interface issues, ranging from page layout and navigation design to e-commerce transaction support and online collaboration; • Public-key and other cryptographic security capabilities that provide confidentiality and the integrity of in-transit and stored data, nonrepudiation of transactions, and the like; and • Other security capabilities, including authentication of users, network monitoring, and intrusion detection. SOURCE: Adapted from NRC/CSTB, 2002, Information Technology Research, Innovation, and E-Government, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., p.
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UNIVERSITY RESEARCH AND BROADER ECONOMIC IMPACTS Much of the government-funded research in IT has been carried out at universities. 34 Between 1976 and 2009 federal support constituted roughly two-thirds of total university research funding in computer science and electrical engineering.35 Among the important characteristics of universities that contribute to their success as engines of innovation are the following: • Universities can focus on long-term research, a special role of universities that IT companies cannot be expected to fill to the same extent.36 (Universities' ability to carry out such research depends, of course, on federal and other sources of funding for research with a long time horizon.)
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42 Federal support for university research drives this process. In Ph.D.-granting computer science programs, more than half of all graduate students receive financial support from the federal government, mostly in the form of research assistantships.43 Another benefit of federally funded academic research that doesn't show up in Figure 1 is research's contribution to the development of open standards and open-source codes that support further innovation.
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