New reports on innovation and federal investment

Cross-posted at the Breakthrough Institute Blog.

The last few weeks have been pretty cool, if your definition of cool, like mine, involves a bevy of new reading materials extolling the benefits of public investment in technology innovation. Dig:

• New report from the American Energy Innovation Council (already blogged about here and here), featuring the wisdom and research of Bill Gates, John Doerr, Jeff Immelt, and other titans of American industry. The report refutes the notion that deficits require paring back our investments in science and technology, and explicitly calls for increased federal funding for energy innovation as well as the creation of new public-private partnerships to bring clean energy technologies to commercial scale. 
• A World Resources Institute working paper called "Two Degrees of Innovation" by Letha Tawney, Francisco Almendra, Pablo Torres, and Lutz Weischer. The paper offers background of innovation systems, and suggests policy mechanisms that would fully realize the potential of the innovation engine in the pursuit of a clean energy economy. The report in particular examines the role of global value chains, innovation ecosystems, and policy support. Ms. Tawney and Mr. Torres blogged about the report here. 
• New report from the OECD called "Fostering Innovation for Green Growth." This new research expresses where the OECD expects innovation to come from (hint: less from a carbon price, more from energy and general scientific R&D). But as is becoming increasingly obvious to those studying the history, more is needed than public investment in R&D; technological innovation requires strategic policies to mature and commercialize emerging technologies, the mechanisms for which will often times be different across a portfolio of technologies. 
• One of the best reads out there on the history and primacy of innovation, "The Entrepreneurial State" is a new pamphlet out of Demos by Mariana Mazzucato. The guiding notion, thoroughly proven, is that states are not just vital in the fixing and regulating markets, but that governments actively foster and create them all the time. This has proven true in computing, biotechnology, aviation, nuclear energy, and now clean technology. 

This is all especially relevant as 1) American federal policy support for clean tech is heading for a crash and 2) the Solyndra story keeps heating the airwaves with critics crying "failure" and "scandal." As the AEIC report points out, the DOE loan guarantee program (the source of the Solyndra loan) is one of the smartest and most successful federal programs in support of clean energy. 

With austerity-mania sweeping the nation and federal clean energy programs about to collapse en masse, now is exactly the time to adopt a unified national energy strategy focused on innovation and strategic investment to bring clean tech to commercial scale unsubsidized. As Ms. Mazzucato puts it in "The Entrepreneurial State,"

In a policy environment where the frontiers of the state are now being deliberately rolled back, that process [of innovation] needs more than ever to be understood so that it can be successfully replicated. Otherwise we miss an opportunity to build greater prosperity in the future.