美国联邦政府支持的跨学科、跨部门科研项目

武夷山

Issues in Science and Technology杂志2014年秋季号发表了美国巴特尔科技政策中心副主任、俄亥俄州立大学公共政策副教授P. Craig Boardman给编辑部的来信，他列举了美国联邦政府为了将不同机构、不同学科、不同部门的科技人员组织、协调到一起来攻克难以解决的社会经济问题而设立的一些计划或项目。我觉得，将这些计划或项目的来龙去脉、实施效果、传承关系给弄清楚，对于我国制定合适的科技政策应有启示。故这里先介绍一下这些典型项目的名称。

1.      Research Applied to National Needs Program（响应国家需求的研究计划），NSF（国家科学基金会）牵头，尼克松总统在任期间实施。

2.      工程研究中心（ERC）计划，NSF牵头。该计划有一个所谓三平面战略规划模型。我当年在驻美使馆科技处工作期间曾撰文介绍ERC计划。

3.      国立卫生研究院的Nanomedicine Development Centers（纳米医学开发中心），详情可见http://nanomedcenter.org/ndc。

4.      NSF的I-Corps计划。I-Corps是Innovation Corps（创新兵团）的简称。对该项目有兴趣者可阅读http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/i-corps/index.jsp上的更多内容。

5.      能源部的Energy Innovation Hub（能源创新枢纽）计划。

（以上第4、第5项计划都是为了打造区域性创新网络。）

6.      能源部的Energy Frontier Research Centers（能源前沿研究中心），这些中心的运行模式与NSF的工程研究中心类似。

   原文如下：

Basic or applied: Does it matter?

With interest have I followed the dialogue on the linear model of innovation betweenVenkatesh Narayanamurti and colleagues ("RIP: The Basic/Applied Research Dichotomy” Issues, Winter 2013, and Forum, Summer 2013) and Neal Lane(Forum, Spring 2013). Both parties provide sociological insight regarding the obsoleteness (empirically if not rhetorically) of the linear model and also in their discussion of an alternative model for guiding national decisionmaking for research policy in the areas of energy, health, basic science, defense, and more broadly U.S. competitiveness. It has been refreshing to see what historically has been the most important question for research policy revisited and addressed so directly and thoughtfully. But the discussion thus far, while valuable sociologically (and mostly in a Kuhnian way, addressing discrepancies between the linear model and how innovation actually occurs in the lab),provides no new insight for  research policy design and implementation.

Thisis a fair criticism for two reasons. First, both parties ignore the bulk of the academic literature on the sociological obsoleteness of the linear model (seefor example Nelson and Winter, Kline and Rosenberg, Rip, Etzkowitz, etc. in Research Policy, Science & Public Policy, and Science, Technology, & Human Values). Moreover, both parties call for government “experiments” in organizing and managing scientists and engineers in ways that acknowledge the discovery/invention dynamic they promote and ignore the fact that such“experimentation” has long been underway in the national mission agencies.

One only need look at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Research Applied to National Needs Program (implemented during the Nixon administration), the NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) program’s three-plane strategic planning model (which is neither hierarchical nor linear despite how it sounds), and more recently efforts by the National Institutes of Health to map biological systems at the nanoscale (such as their Nanomedicine Development Centers),NSF’s I-Corps and DOE’s Energy Innovation Hub programs (both designed to create regional networks of innovation), and DOE’s Energy Frontier Research Centers(which employ a model very similar to ERC’s).

Although different, what these (and other) U.S. research policies have in common is that they shun the linear model and attempt to coordinate diverse sets of scientists and engineers from across institutions, disciplines, and sectors to address difficult socioeconomic problems requiring nonhierarchical discovery and invention. Accordingly, the most important task for research policy scholars such as Narayanamurti et al. and Neal Lane becomes not moving from rational to descriptive models of innovation but rather developing a predictive understanding of when to support individual investigators versus boundary-spanning research centers or networks and, in the case of the latter,how to get the incentives right to ensure innovation in the national interest.

P. CRAIG BOARDMAN

Associate Director, Battelle Center for Science & Technology Policy

Associate Professor of Public Policy, John Glenn School of Public Affairs

Ohio State University

Columbus,Ohio

Boardman.10@osu.edu