Book Review: “Pioneering Progress: American Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy” by William Bonvillian

By Sheeva Azma

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Pioneering Progress is clearly the summation of decades of life experience in the technology innovation sector…a must-read for anyone interested in science and technology policy.

As an MIT gal myself, I was really excited to review the book Pioneering Progress: American Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy by William Bonvillian, an MIT researcher and lecturer, that is published by MIT Press. When the book arrived, I posted a picture of it on Instagram, with a caption about being excited about reading it. Having read this book, I can say that there is, indeed, so much MIT-liciousness (if that can be a word) happening within these pages, from discussions of Vannevar Bush, the first presidential science advisor and a former MIT professor, to discussions of the MIT Rad Lab‘s contributions to World War II, all of which I enjoyed. Hashtag: nerd pride!

It took me several weeks to get through this book amidst a busy holiday season, and I didn’t pore over every word, but I did read several chapters in depth and skim the rest, and I feel much more educated about the realm of US innovation policy now. It is one of those books that I can see myself going back to as a reference if something exciting is happening in a specific sector of US science and technology policy.

About William Bonvillian

William Bonvillian is an MIT professor and scholar in innovation policy who led MIT’s Washington, DC office from 2006 to 2017. His Wikipedia bio lists all various policy jobs he has held for over three decades, first in the Carter administration, then with Sen. Lieberman from 1989 to 2006, where he focused heavily on defense research and development. Since leaving the MIT DC office, he’s taught courses and conducted research at MIT.

Bonvillian’s book, Pioneering Progress: American Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy is his fifth book. It is his first book that he wrote by himself, without other authors or editors. His other four books, in order of publication, are:

• Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution (2009) about encouraging innovation in energy policy
• Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors (2015), which talks about job creation and economic growth through innovation policy
• Advanced Manufacturing – The New American Innovation Policies (2018), which deals with innovation policy for advanced manufacturing
• The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies – Perspectives on the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (2020), which talks about applying the military’s DARPA model to other types of innovation
• Workforce Education – A New Roadmap (2001) about innovation in workforce development

Before I started reading this 325+ page book, it was just sitting on my desk for several days, with the historically loaded title, Pioneering Progress, staring back at me. I have often heard people talk about science as being “pioneering” without completely unpacking – or perhaps even realizing – the analogy to the American settlers traveling west in covered wagons, but this book, to my surprise, actually does discuss it. In Chapter 7, Bonvillian writes, “The frontier was long seen as a force shaping American society…when American settlers faced frustration and felt that opportunities were limited, they could set out in covered wagons, head west, cross mountains if necessary, and open a new frontier. He talks about “covered wagon” technologies which he describes as new technologies that are turned into innovations that can benefit people. In other words, people just invent stuff and we figure out how to use them later.

Innovation drives economic growth, especially amidst stagnation

As it turns out, disruptive innovations, while they make shake up things in the short-term, are ultimately good for the economy.

In Chapter 1, Bonvillian writes about the work of several growth economists whose work showed that even if disruptive in the short-term, technological innovation is good for the economy in the long-term, because it boosts economic growth. He defines growth as an increase in production of both “quantity and quality of goods and services that can support a population over time.” As he writes, classical economists often saw growth as relating to two factors: labor and money. After World War II, economists such as MIT’s Robert Solow began to talk about a third factor: “technical change in the broadest sense,” as Bonvillian writes. In other words, technology offsets the boom-bust cycles of economic progress by providing key advances to make it through difficult times. 

Solow’s growth theory (for which he won the 1987 Nobel Prize), according to Bonvillian, also suggests the idea that “robust innovation capacity is critical to stagnation cycle reduction.” This was an interesting idea that I had never thought about. As a writer, I have been dealing with the effects of ChatGPT and genAI technologies since late 2022. If I could recap everything that has happened in my writing career as a freelance writer since then, I would say that people excitedly adopted ChatGPT, used it to do writing for free at a time of economic scarcity, and now that it is more widespread and people are aware of its limitations, it is being applied more cautiously, but in ways that change my writing work, not eliminate it altogether. So, in a way, my life experience navigating genAI in our tumultuous economic times is further proof of the postwar growth economists that Bonvillian talks about.

A second growth economist Bonvillian mentions in the first chapter of the book is Paul Romer, who adds a fourth dimension to the list of things promoting growth: not just labor, money, and technical change, but also human capital (also called talent in the book). Given that talent is part of technological advance as well, the two are tied together. As Bonvillian relates about Romer’s economic theories: “A large population is not enough to generate growth; the key is the quantity of human capital engaged in research.” Bonvillian dedicates Chapter 11 to talking about the US workforce and its unique needs, especially to achieve technology-based growth. Romer, who also spent some time studying at MIT, shared the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 2018 for “demonstrating how economic forces govern the willingness of firms to produce new ideas and innovations.”

One problem that Bonvillian discusses throughout the book is that to get a technology from basic research to a product or service can take a while; in the initial stages, this is typically funded by the government, but as time progresses, the development becomes more practical and also more expensive, and this is where many projects fail in the US model of innovation. Bonvillian calls this point in technology development the “valley of death.” There are a number of workarounds he suggests via different stakeholders, but you’ll have to read the book to learn more about that. It is an interesting discussion and one that will be familiar to you if you have spent any time working with technology startups, and writing about advances in technology, as I have.

Innovation processes must be politically sustainable to last

Beyond the actual innovation process, another aspect that is important to science and technology development is “political sustainability.” The model of science and technology innovation in the US relies on government support – in other words, taxpayer funds – for basic research that can yield new technologies and disease cures, for instance. While the challenges of innovation in particular science spheres (for example: health, energy, technology, agriculture) are context-dependent, the longstanding tradition, at least post-World War II, is to use government funds to support research into semiconductors or the pathological process of Alzheimer’s disease that can then be picked up and further developed by a company which can dedicate more funds to turning that into a product or service that enriches and improves people’s lives.

The National Institutes of Health or NIH is the biomedical research agency for the US – and it has a “long and bureaucratic” history – Bonvillian writes that it started in a bacteria lab in a Staten Island attic in New York to serve merchant marines, then moved to Washington, DC in 1891, merging with another agency. In 1930, the lab got its current name – the National Institutes of Health – and moved to Bethesda, Maryland, where it has been since 1938.

People – both outsiders to government and politicians such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy with their new Department of Government Efficiency, and insiders to biomedical science as discussed by Bonvillian, are interested in continually revising and updating the NIH structure and processes to better facilitate biomedical innovation. In 2003, the Institute of Medicine (now called National Academy of Medicine) published a detailed report on ways the NIH could be reorganized and reworked to better serve its overall mission. In some ways, one could argue that the longstanding bipartisan support for NIH stems indeed from its long, bureaucratic history as a small government organization, and then a more well-defined one, as well as its ability to sustain difficult political times. As Bonvillian writes, efforts to reorganize NIH could draw ire from the many NIH subsections that are dedicated to different diseases, which were established in a somewhat political process to appease various stakeholders. So, I have learned reading this book, political involvement in science helps make it more sustainable among policymakers.

Bonvillian also talks about Operation Warp Speed in the context of the many challenges to innovation due to the way the NIH is organized, as well as other structural issues relating to healthcare delivery, while also touting it as a good example of public-private sector partnerships. Indeed, one cannot talk about biomedical innovation without discussing the complex way in which NIH-supported therapeutics are administered in our healthcare system, sometimes at a prohibitive cost to patients. Bonvillian also discusses the high cost of healthcare that makes it unsustainable for the government to step in and subsidize taxpayers’ out-of-pocket costs. This intrigued me, as I traveled to Capitol Hill in September 2024 to advocate for patient safety – and one of my ‘asks’ was that the healthcare industry not pay for unsafe care.

I loved reading this book

There is a lot to read about in this book, way more than I have recapped above, and there is no real way I could summarize the whole thing in a single blog post. This book is clearly the result of a lifetime of work in science and technology policy, and I think it would be cool to be one of Dr. Bonvillian’s students at MIT and learn about all of this firsthand. However, in the absence of me being able to do that, this was a great, informative read.

Pioneering Progress is one of those books that you can read cover-to-cover to get a broad picture of the US and global science and technology policy landscape, but be prepared for information overload if you do that in one sitting! I am a picky reader with not a lot of free time for leisurely reading these days, so I skipped through to different chapters I was interested in (Chapter 8 on biomedical innovation policy was my favorite, since I am a life scientist by training). While, as you can tell, I really enjoyed the first chapter on growth economics and why technology is good for the economy, I already know quite a lot about how innovation actually happens, both due to taking science policy courses and from working on projects for my freelance clients in the technology sector, including developing marketing documents for small technology startups. So, I skipped those chapters, but I could see myself coming back to them depending on what is happening in Congress and the Executive Branch with respect to innovation policy.

If you are looking for a book that will teach you absolutely everything you need to know about US science policy to be a good advocate for science in the policy world, especially in the executive and legislative branches, this is the perfect read. This book is clearly the summation of decades of life experience in the technology innovation sector, and its wealth of expertise make it a must-read for anyone interested in science and technology policy. Pick up a copy at MIT Press or on Amazon.

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