Excess Intellectual Capacity

This post might well be titled The Many Pathways to Globalization II. As I thought about Suzanne Berger’s discussion in How We Compete regarding the need for corporations to have “excess capacity” –both in terms of production capabilities and research - in order to respond quickly to future opportunities, I realized I had heard some of that argument before in a very different, but not unrelated, context. In 1945, Vannevar Bush in his enormously influential report Science-The Endless Frontier, made a very closely related point in arguing for government support of basic university research.

Noting the critical contributions of science to the war effort, Bush argued that it was an appropriate role of government to create “scientific capital” which could improve the economy and enable the country to better defend itself should another war erupt. Creation of scientific capital encompassed both educating more people, and supporting high level research. Most interestingly, Bush believed this scientific capital must not be inspired by focusing on some societal problem that needed to be solved. Rather its creation should be driven by the interests and creativity of the researchers themselves. That is, research should be investigator initiated and driven. Bush defined this goal-independent, investigator initiated research as “basic”. Thus Bush’s scientific capital is similar on a broader scale to the excess intellectual capital that Berger suggests was critical to many of the corporate product innovations of the past decades -- knowledge created without constraints that it fit an immediate need, “warehoused” for use in an as-yet unknown circumstance.

As I describe in “Change and the Research University” (see post Metrics of Academic Excellence for the 21^st Century, 2/27/06), the Bush ideals of creation of scientific capital began to be overtaken by market forces in the latter years of the 20^th century following the Reagan administration, and government interest in supporting research that Bush would have called basic declined. Over the decades, government funding has moved more in the direction of research that is inspired both by search for fundamental knowledge, and by considerations of use. Elegant arguments for this type of dual purpose research are described by Donald Stokes in Pasteur’s Quadrant: Basic Research and Technological Innovation. The NIH, for example, supports much fundamental research, but in areas that may be of use in combating specific diseases.  This leaves many other areas of biological research with minimal funding, and consequentially little ability to contribute to the development of scientific capital.

Berger describes generally decreasing corporate R&D expenditures, and a narrowing of research focus. She talks of many companies in the biotech and pharmaceutical industry as being dependent on access to research being carried out in universities using federal funds. She describes these companies as “fishing for discoveries in a rushing stream of basic biological and medical research pouring out of university laboratories that are massively supported by public funds.” (p.296) This is certainly true, but market forces at the governmental level already have worked to make this rushing stream much more narrow than Vannevar Bush would have wanted it to be.

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