This report reviews a variety of partnership programs in the United States, and finds that partnerships constitute a vital positive element of public policy, helping to address major challenges and opportunities at the nexus of science, technology, and economic growth.

This report addresses a topic of recognized policy concern. To capture the benefits of substantial U.S. investments in biomedical R&D, parallel investments in a wide range of seemingly unrelated disciplines are also required. This report summarizes a major conference that reviewed our nation's R&D support for biotechnology and information technologies. The volume includes newly commissioned research and makes recommendations and findings concerning the important relationship between information technologies and biotechnology. It emphasizes the fall off in R&D investments needed to sustain the growth of the U.S. economy and to capitalize on the growing investment in biomedicine. It also encourages greater support for inter-disciplinary training to support new areas such as bioinformatics and urges more emphasis on and support for multi-disciplinary research centers.

Research and development (R and D) leads to innovation, and innovation leads to technological change. Technological change, in turn, is the primary driver of economic growth. Public/private partnerships -- cooperative relationships among industry, government, and/or universities -- leverage the efficiency of R and D and are thus a critical aspect of a nation’s innovation system. This text is intended for upper-level undergraduate and MBA courses such as Economics and Technology, Economics of Innovation, and Economics of Science and Technology, among others. The first chapter introduces the concept of public/private research partnerships along with other concepts fundamental to an understanding of innovation and technology policy. The framework chapters (2-5) set forth an argument for the public’s role – government’s role – in innovation in general and in public/private partnership in particular. The remaining chapters (6-14) describe a number of public/private partnerships and, to the extent possible, evaluate their social impact.

Government-industry partnerships are necessary for small businesses to successfully launch new and innovative ideas into the market place. Small businesses, the cornerstone for economic job creation, expansion and retention, is hampered with the need to fund new and innovative technologies from profits which generally occur in a cyclic manner. This cyclic funding leads to ramp ups and development during profitable years, and delays and abeyance during years of downturn. Government-industry partnerships directly addresses this problem by offering funding assistance in the form of resources eliminating the ''peaks and valleys'' of development. This paper will detail a case study of this type of assistance.

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.