To mark the opening of a study of Comparative Innovation Policy: Best Practice for the 21st Century the Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy (STEP) convened a symposium providing an overview of areas to be examined in the study and topics requiring further policy attention. The event highlighted the policies and programs of leading nations and provided valuable insights into some of the common challenges of growing and supporting high-technology industry and the commercialization of public investments in R&D. This report contains a summary of the symposium proceedings and an introduction analyzing the issues and placing them in a broader policy context.

The National Science Foundation developed the Science of Science and Innovation Policy program (SciSIP) in 2006 to fund basic and applied research that bears on and can help guide public- and private-sector policy making for science and innovation. By design, SciSIP has engaged researchers from many domains in the development of a community of practice who work together to continually develop frameworks, tools, and datasets for implementing science and innovation policy. Since its inception, the SciSIP program has funded more than 150 researchers and their graduate students. The program also contributed to the initiation of the STAR METRICS (Science and Technology for America's Reinvestment: Measuring the Effect of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness and Science) program, a collaborative effort between the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. The STAR METRICS program develops tools and mechanisms for measuring federal expenditures on scientific activities, with particular focus on quantifying productivity and employment outcomes. Science of Science and Innovation Policy summarizes a public conference convened by the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council to present research funded by SciSIP and foster intellectual exchange among funded researchers, science, technology, and innovation policy practitioners, and other members of the science community. The conference highlighted advances in the emerging field of the science of science and innovation policy, in particular, models, frameworks, tools, and datasets comprising the evidentiary basis for science and innovation policy. This report focuses on return on investment models; organizational structures that foster accelerated scientific productivity; linkages between commercialized scientific knowledge and job creation; the roles of universities and government in technology transfer and innovation; technology diffusion and economic growth; non-economic impacts of science and innovation expenditures; regional and global networks of knowledge generation and innovation; mechanisms for encouraging creativity and measuring outputs and outcomes from transformative research; and development, manipulation and visualization of data representing scientific activities.

Many nations are currently adopting a variety of directed strategies to launch and support research parks, often with significant financial commitments and policy support. By better understanding how research parks of other nations operate, we can seek to improve the scale and contributions of parks in the U.S. To that end, the National Academies convened an international conference on global best practices in research parks. This volume, a report of the conference, includes discussion of the diverse roles that research parks in both universities and laboratories play in national innovation systems. The presentations identify common challenges and demonstrate substantial differences in research park programs around the world.

Many nations are currently adopting a variety of directed strategies to launch and support research parks, often with significant financial commitments and policy support. By better understanding how research parks of other nations operate, we can seek to improve the scale and contributions of parks in the U.S. To that end, the National Academies convened an international conference on global best practices in research parks. This volume, a report of the conference, includes discussion of the diverse roles that research parks in both universities and laboratories play in national innovation systems. The presentations identify common challenges and demonstrate substantial differences in research park programs around the world.

This symposium, which was held on March 10-11, 2003, at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, brought together policy experts and managers from the government and academic sectors in both developed and developing countries to (1) describe the role, value, and limits that the public domain and open access to digital data and information have in the context of international research; (2) identify and analyze the various legal, economic, and technological pressures on the public domain in digital data and information, and their potential effects on international research; and (3) review the existing and proposed approaches for preserving and promoting the public domain and open access to scientific and technical data and information on a global basis, with particular attention to the needs of developing countries.