Promoting Opportunity and Growth Through Science, Technology, and Innovation

Résumé du livre

"The need for public investment in research arises because, left to itself, the private sector will invest less in R & D than is justified by the benefits that R & D offers to society. This underinvestment results from the fact that innovators receive only a small fraction of the benefits from their inventions. Several estimates show that innovators capture less than one-quarter of the total value of their innovations; the remaining benefits accrue to consumers of products that make use of the innovations. As a result, the private sector invests less in R & D than is necessary for the nation to realize its full potential for broad-based economic growth. Such underinvestment is particularly acute in basic research (as opposed to applied R & D), which has important spillover benefits and plays a key role in developing the fundamental technologies that are too distant from the commercial marketplace to attract sufficient private sector investment"--Page 4.