A Science of Science and Innovation Policy Research Agenda

Dr. John Marburger’s recent calls for a new science of science policy open up new opportunities to reconceptualize, retest, and revise as needed the theories, models, descriptions, and mainstream propositions underlying United States’ science and innovation policies and programs.

We respond to these calls by presenting a research agenda directed at two objectives. First, as academic researchers who have long worked in the field of science and innovation policy, albeit from different analytical and disciplinary perspectives, we seek to insure that efforts to promote the “science” of science and technology, or innovation policy produce substantive scholarly work that in fact advances our fundamental understanding of underlying processes. Second, as participants in numerous U.S. and international science and innovation policy advisory forums and commissions, we seek to promote a closer, better fitting, coupling between the research communities who are addressing questions of the science of science policy -- themselves a disparate disciplinary lot -- with the policy communities who are seeking improved understandings of whether or how the decisions they have made or are being called upon to make in fact have led to the intended results. Our strategy to achieve these two objectives is to identify questions that are simultaneously intellectually challenging and policy relevant.

• Other (Non-IAC) Department
• School of Public Policy