How should the United States craft policies that effectively spur technological innovation? With increasing competitive challenges from other nations, particularly in technology and innovation-based sectors once thought to be largely immune from foreign competition, there is increasing interest in crafting policies to help spur innovation. But if innovation policies are to be effective, it’s critical that they be based on an accurate understanding of the U.S. innovation system—in particular, an understanding of where U.S. in- novations come from. This report does this by analyzing the sources of award-winning innovations over the past few decades. It finds that the sources of these innovations have changed in two key ways. First, large firms acting on their own account for a much smaller share of award-winning innovations, while innovations stemming from collab- orations with spin-offs from universities and federal laboratories make up a much larger share. Second, the number of innovations that are federally-funded has increased dramatically. These findings suggest that the U.S. innovation system has become much more collaborative in nature. Federal innovation policy needs to reflect this fact.
