Benoît Godin suggested that I take a look at Ron Freedman’s “10 S&T Strategy Conundrums.” I think it’s a document that a lot of folks should read. While Freedman is focused on the situation in Canada, there’s a lot for the rest of the world to consider. In particular, American states ought to be asking themselves some tough questions in light of these “conundrums.”
I’m particularly taken with Freedman’s development of the “mid-sized company” problem (Conundrum #4):
While we have some rudimentary data about the overall population of medium-sized firms as a whole, unbelievably, nobody has crunched the numbers for mid-sized S&T firms. We don’t know a single thing about the pool of tomorrow’s tech stars: how many of them there are, in which industry sectors, which parts of the country, how many people they employ, what their R&D spending is, etc., etc.
So, an additional conundrum is that we have been fashioning S&T strategies without knowing anything about the critical population of medium-sized firms and their special needs for government support. What is your solution to this conundrum?
If all those university “start-ups” are supposed to become something big, then where are the mid-sized firms that were university start-ups five years ago? Why do the universities only report how many are “still in business” and then lump them all in with, say, Google, and expect us to believe that the approach “works.” How do we know that Google wasn’t just special, a kind of luck, rather than the implication that it is just one more “output”of an administrative process that is rigging for volume but not reporting the structure of its activity or results? Indeed, why do our science and technology policies have next to nothing to say about luck? What would a state-based technology policy look like, if it were based on improving the luck of creative folks messing around with stuff?