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Silicon Valley can't spur innovation on its own - the state has a vital role
Technology entrepreneurs are ploughing funds into pioneering science and engineering projects - but they need long-term, large-scale investment. That's a job for government, says a leading economist and academic
William Janeway is a partner and senior adviser at Warburg Pincus, a visiting scholar in economics at Cambridge University, and the author of Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, published by Cambridge University Press
The Observer, Sunday 25 August 2013
“Can individual initiatives backed by personal fortunes reinvigorate the digital revolution and launch new transformational technologies? The short answer is no. To understand why, we need to read the relevant history of the innovation economy, from the early days of the first industrial revolution through to the gestation and commercial birth of our continuing digital revolution.
However, it is important to recognise that the impact of the digital revolution itself is far from played out. Only 50 years on from the technical realisation of the programmable microprocessor, momentum is accelerating across a broad front.
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In this context, it is useful to recognise that the “killer app” of the railway age - mail order retail - did not emerge until a full 50 years after the first “railway mania” on the London stock exchange. And reconstruction of manufacturing to take advantage of electrification plus the mass distribution of home appliances each reached its respective tipping point some 50 years after Edison turned on the first generating plant.
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First, commercialisation of new materials takes decades, during which production is reduced to cheap and reliable practice. In parallel, commercialisation also requires an extended search for applications in which the new material's characteristics allow it to replace what is already used, or induce the invention of entirely new applications.
This is why - with one exception - new materials have invariably been commercialised by large, established enterprises (as plastics were by ICI, DuPont and General Electric), not by startups, however visionary their entrepreneurial leadership may be. And that singular exception - silicon - is the one that, as we shall see, truly proves the rule.
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So at each stage the innovation economy depends upon sources of funding unconcerned with near-term, quantifiable economic value. Angel investors have always played a role, from James Watt's partner Matthew Boulton on. [Charles Darwin's father, heir to his father-in-law Josiah Wedgwood I's fortune, funded his son's investigations of natural history. And the first physics laboratory of the English-speaking world, the Cavendish at Cambridge, is named for its donor, the 7th Duke of Devonshire, William Cavendish.] But the complementary sources of institutional support for innovative investments at scale have been masses of financial speculators, participating in capital market bubbles, and the state, in pursuit of politically legitimate missions, from national development to national security.
The canals and railways of the first two waves of innovation were supported by compulsory purchase orders in the UK and, in the US, by direct subsidies. In each case, financial manias followed. The electricity grids of the third wave attracted finance during the Roaring Twenties due to the provision by the state of regional monopolies. And the highways of the fourth, automobile revolution were directly constructed by the state as the multitude of car manufacturers sorted themselves out competitively.
Silicon is the source material of the fifth, digital revolution. Its commercialisation was in substantial part led by entrepreneurial startups, notably Texas Instruments and Intel. Their distinctive success was directly due to the encompassing role of the American defence department. For the US government not only funded fundamental research across all the digital domains. It served as a creative, collaborative customer, pulling all its suppliers down the learning curve to low-cost, reliable production. The dotcom/telecom bubble at the end of the last century was its baby.
We cannot expect the present generation of techno-philanthropists to replace the agencies of the state. Scale matters. For 25 years, from 1953 to 1978, federal funding accounted for more than half of all R&D in the United States or about 1% of GDP. An equivalent amount would be more than $1.5 bn today. Even the annual budget of the National Institutes of Health is “only” $35bn.”