How to Invent and Protect Your Invention: A Guide to Patents for Scientists and Engineers

13.9 INNOVATION AND PUBLIC POLICY

We have seen a plethora of innovation-related initiatives hosted by institutions, companies, municipalities, states, regions, and nations within the past 20 years. The U.S. government has been the primary funder of basic research for many decades, leading to numerous inventions and innovations. Consider the list of 50 important innovations and discoveries funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in its first 50 years, as reported by NSF. This list includes inventions and innovations that became platforms for commercial products and services and that are widely used, such as barcodes, CAD/CAM software, data compression technology used in compact discs, and even the Internet (which the NSF funded along with DARPA, a defense research agency).

Since 1982, the federal government has also sponsored Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants to support innovation in small enterprises. The SBIR program supports scientific and technological innovation in critical national priorities related to economic development, defense, health, energy, and other national interests. The program provides financial support for some of the best early-stage innovation ideas, which at times are still too high risk for private investors.

More recently, the U.S. federal government shifted some of its resources and focus to downstream commercialization rather than to upstream funding for basic research. For example, the U.S. Department of Commerce, Economic Development ...