Accelerating Public Innovation
The Social Science Research Council recently launched a series of new Agenda Fund initiatives focused on accelerating public innovation, or the discovery and implementation of more effective ways of delivering public goods and services like health, education, safety, clean air and water, growth-oriented infrastructure, and scientific and technological innovation. In this President’s Desk essay, SSRC President Anna Harvey reflects on how emerging research on the determinants of innovation in governments and universities can help us design, test, and implement evidence-based strategies that accelerate public innovation.
Nobel Laureate Paul Romer has described the economy as “a huge innovation discovery machine,” producing remarkable advances in well-being through the continual discovery of new commercially valuable goods and services. Economic growth depends on this scientific and technological innovation.
But growth also depends on public innovation, or the continual discovery and implementation of more effective ways of delivering societally valuable public goods and services like health, education, safety, clean air and water, growth-oriented infrastructure, and even scientific and technological innovation itself.
There are growing concerns about the lack of public innovation in the US and its potentially dire implications for a future of abundance. But few have proposed plausible and actionable solutions to the problem.
An emerging body of research tells us that public decision makers are more likely to adopt more effective policies and practices when they are engaged as partners in the research projects that produce the evidence of efficacy, helping to define the set of feasible policy alternatives, design new policy interventions, and address potential implementation challenges. Decision makers also prioritize local evidence and local experts; proximity matters for public innovation. The way we communicate evidence to public decision makers also matters for public innovation.
These findings can help us define a research agenda designed to develop, test, and implement interventions that support innovation in governments and on university campuses. In partnership with the 86 campuses in the Social Science Research Council’s College and University Fund for the Social Sciences, we have developed a family of Agenda Fund initiatives that offer opportunities for social and behavioral science R&D to accelerate public innovation.
Accelerating Innovation in State and Local Governments
Advocates of abundance have identified “failed public policy” as an increasingly significant barrier to growth. State and local policies that fail to effectively deliver critically important public goods and services like health, education, safety, clean air and water, and growth-oriented infrastructure are of particular concern.
Part of the challenge is that we have far too few credible evaluations of the efficacy of state and local policies and programs. For example, the American Rescue Plan, the largest one-time federal investment in state and local governments in the last century, provided $350 billion in State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds to state, territorial, local, and tribal governments to accelerate post-pandemic economic recovery. Yet very few of those investments are being evaluated for efficacy.
But another part of the challenge is that state and local governments often don’t adopt more effective policies even when shown rigorous evidence that these policies are more effective than status quo policies. We need not only to identify policies that are better than existing policies, but also to support the implementation of those policies. In the words of Ezra Klein, we need not only to “imagin[e] the policies that a capable government could execute,” but also to “imagin[e] how to make a government capable of executing them.”
We can do better than imagination. A growing body of research on the evidence-to-policy pipeline is documenting factors that increase the likelihood that state and local governments will implement evidence-based policy reform. First, government decision makers are more likely to adopt evidence-based policy reforms when they are grounded in local evidence and/or recommended by local researchers. A Boston-based study showing that relaxing density restrictions reduces rents and house prices will do less to convince San Francisco decision makers than either a San Francisco-based study or San-Francisco based researchers endorsing the evidence from Boston. Localized experimentation can also confirm that a good idea in one context is translatable to others.
Second, government decision makers are more likely to adopt evidence-based policy reforms when they are engaged as partners in the research projects that produce the evidence of efficacy, helping to define the set of feasible policy alternatives, design new policy interventions, and overcome implementation challenges.
Third, the way we communicate evidence to policymakers also matters for government innovation. For example, providing policymakers with side-by-side estimates of the social returns to alternative policies increases their responsiveness to evidence.
These strategies have been used in the past to produce a remarkable degree of state and local government innovation. At the turn of the century, state and local governments partnered with the nation’s emerging research universities to develop and test science-based methods to more effectively deliver public services, including innovative systems to safely dispose of waste and purify drinking water. Local governments’ adoption of clean water technologies alone was largely responsible for striking decreases in mortality well before the invention of modern antibiotics and vaccines, contributing to mid-century economic growth. But as federal funding for basic science research grew after WWII, the nation’s preeminent research universities largely turned away from the contract-based applied research that had served the needs of state and local governments, leaving these governments without their innovation partners.
In partnership with the member institutions in our College and University Fund for the Social Sciences, we are leveraging the emerging research findings about the determinants of government innovation, as well as the historical record of successful research partnerships between universities and state and local governments, to define a set of evidence-based Agenda Fund initiatives designed to accelerate state and local government innovation.
These initiatives include Incubating Policy Innovation Research Partnerships, aimed at facilitating the formation of more research partnerships between state and local governments and College and University Fund member institutions; Building Government Innovation Research Capacity, focused on building the research administration capacity necessary to support state and local government research partnerships, with a particular focus on less-resourced College and University Fund institutions; Supporting Policy Innovation Labs, bringing together College and University Fund institutions to develop a legislative proposal to build a national network of university-based policy innovation labs in every state, modeled on the highly effective network of Agriculture Experiment Stations established by the Hatch Act of 1887; Measuring the Social Returns to Government Innovation, coordinating researchers from College and University Fund institutions to develop standardized measures of the social returns to alternative policy interventions; and Accelerating Climate-Protective Policy Innovation, aimed at supporting College and University Fund institutions’ work to develop, test, and implement climate-protective policy innovations.
Accelerating Innovation in the Federal Government
The Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (aka the Evidence Act) directed federal agencies to appoint Chief Evaluation Officers and develop plans to evaluate the efficacy of their policies and programs. Implementing these planned evaluations will enable agencies to learn what is working and what isn’t, and to iterate towards more effective policies and programs. However, many agencies lack the internal capacity to execute these evaluations. Further, there currently exist few research partnerships between federal agencies and university-based researchers to support the execution of these planned evaluations.
The shortage of evaluation capacity exists even with the nation’s largest science funding agencies, which invest billions of dollars in scientific and technological innovation yet provide little support for government innovation. For example, the National Institutes of Health recently issued a request for support from the research community in evaluating the efficacy of NIH investments, but is providing no funding for that research support. The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency deploys Federal Acquisition Regulations Part 35, Research and Development Contracting, to contract with university-based scientists on defense-related R&D, but to date has not similarly leveraged FAR Part 35 contracts to support evaluations of the efficacy of its R&D investments. The National Science Foundation’s GOALI program supports research collaborations between academic scientists and industry partners on projects that advance scientific and technological innovation. Yet NSF lacks an analogous funding vehicle to support research collaborations between academic researchers and government agencies on projects that advance innovation in the delivery of public goods and services.
Working with College and University Fund member institutions, we are developing an initiative to support federal agencies’ implementation of the Evidence Act. The initiative is aimed at facilitating more R&D partnerships between university-based researchers and federal agencies to evaluate the efficacy of agencies’ policies and programs, and to iterate toward more effective policies and programs. By developing sources of funding support for these research partnerships, from both philanthropic foundations and federal science agencies, and by providing opportunities for agencies’ evaluation teams to engage with researchers from the SSRC’s university consortium, we hope that this initiative will help to accelerate innovation in the federal government.
Accelerating Scientific and Technological Innovation
The midcentury period of rapid growth in productivity and economic output in the US was supported by a remarkably well-coordinated R&D pipeline, with research universities specializing in basic science and large corporate R&D labs specializing in applied research and development aimed at commercializing scientific advances. But as corporate R&D investments became more narrowly focused on last-mile product development, universities continued to specialize in basic science, and the volume of pre-commercial applied research shrank. Many observers fear that the widening “valley of death” between early stage basic science and late stage product development may be swallowing promising scientific discoveries, contributing to the post-1970s slowdown of productivity growth in the US.
Many universities invest in programs aimed at filling this gap by facilitating applied R&D collaborations between academic scientists and industry partners. But we lack evidence about the efficacy of these programs, and about other university policies and practices that might encourage commercially viable innovation. Fostering more research partnerships with universities to develop, test, and implement more effective ways to incubate pre-commercial applied research could potentially accelerate the pace of scientific and technological innovation.
We also know little about the pathways through which funded university research contributes to scientific and technological innovation. Existing work focuses on the production of publications and patents by grant-funded principal investigators. But there may be other important pathways through which grant-funded research contributes to scientific and technological innovation. For example, the undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and research staff trained through university-based research grants may be important contributors to scientific and technological innovation once they leave university campuses. Securing better estimates of the contributions of grant-funded students and early career researchers to scientific and technological innovation after they leave university campuses could enable the development of targeted interventions that accelerate those contributions.
Finally, we lack reliable evidence about cost-effective and scalable interventions that could be widely implemented on university campuses to increase and broaden opportunities in critical STEM fields. Expanding this evidence base and securing the implementation of effective interventions could potentially accelerate the pace of scientific and technological innovation.
Working with College and University Fund member institutions, we are developing several initiatives aimed at accelerating the pace of scientific and technological innovation. These include Incubating Innovation Partnerships, aimed at working with College and University Fund institutions to develop, test, and implement interventions that cost-effectively increase applied research collaborations between university-based scientists and industry partners; Accelerating Research-Led Innovation, coordinating work with College and University Fund institutions to produce reliable estimates of the contributions of formerly grant-funded students and early career researchers to scientific and technological innovation; and Broadening Innovation Opportunities, focused on working with College and University Fund institutions to grow the rigorous evidence base for cost-effective and scalable interventions that increase and broaden opportunity in STEM fields.
We welcome collaboration on these Agenda Fund initiatives! If you’re interested in joining this work, or you have an idea for an Agenda Fund initiative, we want to hear from you.