13. DATA AVAILABILITY AND RESEARCH STRATEGY

To get some feel for the extent to which this model might be applicable to innovations derived from ATP-financed work, I contacted 16 ATP award recipients, chosen more or less at random from the list I was furnished by ATP staff, directly without ATP's intermediation.

While these conversations were far too brief to provide more than first impressions, there was no obvious indication that this model—or some simple variant thereof—would not be applicable, at least as a first approximation.

Equally important, most of the award recipients I spoke with seemed quite willing to cooperate with a study of the social and private returns from innovations based on their results. Several of them were very enthusiastic. But in several cases (all large corporations), there was undisguised hostility to any such effort. As in the case of our 1977 study, I think that some firms are extremely concerned about the leakage of sensitive information. It is almost a cultural phenomenon. I don't think that this attitude is correlated with the social rate of return from innovations based on the firm's results, so the omission of such firms from a study may not be a serious problem. But based on this very small sample, perhaps one-quarter of the contractors are likely to be uncooperative (though there may be some pretense of cooperation, particularly if ATP invokes the terms of the cooperative research agreement which all the firms signed, that, among other things, requires their participation in evaluation studies).

The majority of the firms contacted said that it would be at least two years before the results of their ATP-funded projects would be commercialized. Many felt that, although rough estimates might be made at present, it would take some years before hard numbers would be available regarding profits and widespread savings generated by innovations based on their projects. This, of course, is entirely in accord with our discussion in Section 4. 

Perhaps the procedure of estimating the relevant social rates of return should be viewed as a dynamic, continuing process. Like the firm in Figure 1, the investigators responsible for the estimates might update their figures as new data on (P₁ - P₂), Q₂, and so on become available. It is not certain whether progress on many of these projects to date is adequate to support meaningful analyses of social rates of return. As time goes by, and as the innovations based on ATP-financed R&D are commercialized and their diffusion rates become clearer, estimates of social rates of return should become feasible in more cases and increasingly reliable. The results might provide a wealth of information of use to decision makers, policy analysts, and economists.

Turning to NIST's data collection activities regarding the ATP program, it seems logical to ask award recipients concerning probabilities of technical success and of commercialization (given technical success), as well as development and commercialization cost and time, and (P₁ - P₂), Q₂ and profits, among other things. It would also be very desirable to launch studies carried out by non-government personnel permitted to obtain such data on a confidential basis from the award recipients. If these personnel are highly reputable, the results would be likely to enjoy greater credibility than findings based on estimates submitted by award recipients to the agency. Rightly or wrongly, data obtained from award recipients by agencies on matters relating to the effectiveness of the agency's programs are sometimes viewed with suspicion.

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Date created: June 15, 2006
Last updated: June 16, 2006

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