Innovation: More than Science and Technology

As global economic competition intensifies, more countries are deliberately using public policy to shape national systems that allow firms to access innovations that can give them a leg up, according to a special section on global innovation policy in the fall edition of Issues in Science and Technology.

The section focuses on national innovation systems in Mexico, Belgium, India, Korea, Japan, and the United States, and includes articles by R. Chidambaram, the principal scientific adviser to the government of India, Sungchul Chung, president of Korea's Science and Technology Policy
Institute, and Fientje Moerman, vice-minister-president of Flanders and minister for economy, enterprise, science, innovation, and foreign trade.

Managing a national innovation system is a constant challenge -- and struggle, according to Charles Wessner, deputy director of the National Research Council's Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy.

"What works in one context will not necessarily work in another," Wessner writes. "What works in one decade will not necessarily work in the next. And with the global economic system in flux, every country must be ready to reexamine and revise its policies.

"These articles contain no easy answers," Wessner continues. "They offer something much more useful: candid and perceptive discussion of the successes and failures that are slowly leading all of us to a better understanding of how innovation can be tapped and directed to achieve human goals."

In the United States, substantial changes in the national innovation system will be needed, argues Christopher Hill of George Mason University. In his article, The Post-Scientific Society, Hill writes that although science and technology will continue to play a vital role in innovation,
the critical ingredients for continued U.S. economic success are likely to come from other disciplines.

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CONSUMED: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole

In his new book CONSUMED: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, political scientist Benjamin Barber offers a vivid portrayal of the way that a consumerist mentality has superseded the public good.

With a combination of vast evidence and sharp insight, Barber explains howAmerican society is being transformed by the triumph of consumerism, and the potentially devastating consequences this transformation has already had on democracy.

Tracing the economic and intellectual history of capitalism, Barber argues that in the late 18th century, capitalism brought the promise of economic parity. During the two centuries following its ascendancy, the free market provided essential goods that met the public's needs. In recent decades, however, most of the critical public infrastructure needs like housing, education, roads and health care, had been met and people shifted their attention to non-essential desires instead.

In CONSUMED, Barber argues that the rise in consumerism has created a dangerous mentality that values personal choice over the public good, thereby infantilizing otherwise mature adults and turning children into permanent shoppers. Divided by their conflicting impulses as consumers and as citizens, individuals are increasingly drawn to a behavior Barber terms "civic schizophrenia."

The only solution, Barber argues, is "a transformation of capitalism back into a needs-satisfying economic machine, and a transformation of democracy back into the sovereign guarantor of all domains private, the market domain included." The only way to do this, and also save capitalism from itself, is to democratize globalization.

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