Learning from Trump and Xi? Globalization and innovation as drivers of a new industrial policy. Bertelsmann GED Focus 2020

Technological innovations are essential drivers of longterm and sustainable growth. Accordingly, there currently is a debate in Germany and the EU as to whether a new, strategic industrial policy can be an answer to the complex dynamics of digitization. Products of this discussion are, for example, the Industrial Strategy 2030 published by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy in November 2019 and the Franco-German Manifesto for a European Industrial Policy for the 21st Century. The focus here is on the question of how the EU and its member states can maintain their innovative and thus competitive ability in the face of diverse challenges. However, there is no standard recipe for building and expanding the innovative capacity of an economy. Different countries rely on different strategies that can be equally successful. An important distinguishing feature is the role of the state. A clear example of divergent innovation models are China and the USA. Although both countries have completely different approaches to an innovation-promoting industrial policy, both models are characterized by major technological successes. With an analysis of the Chinese and American innovation system, this study highlights the main features and success factors of both innovation models and discusses whether and to what extent these factors are transferable to the European and German case. Five fields of action for an innovation-promoting industrial policy in the EU and Germany emerge from this analysis • Implementation of a long-term innovation strategy • Expansion of venture capital • Expansion of cluster approaches at EU level • Thinking and strengthening of cybersecurity at EU level • Creation of uniform and fair conditions for competition In addition to these fields of action, which are relevant both for the EU and for individual member states, industrial policy measures in the following three areas could be useful for Germany. In particular: • Improvement of framework conditions for research and development • Gearing the education and research system more strongly towards entrepreneurship and innovation • State as a pioneer and trailblazer in new technologies In their implementation, however, strategic European and German industrial policies face a trade-off between the protection and promotion of legitimate self-interests on the one hand and the defense against economically damaging protectionism and ill-considered state interventionism on the other. The so-called “mission orientation” can make a significant contribution here: Accordingly, industrial policy should serve to address specific societal challenges (e. g. globalization, digitization, demographic change, climate change) and be coherently targeted towards these objectives. Furthermore, industrial policy is to be driven in parallel by different actors. Above all, it is a joint task of business and politics to enable a competitive business location where the state ensures good competition- promoting framework conditions and the private actors implement concrete actions

Policy issues in interconnecting networks

To support the activities of the Federal Research Coordinating Committee (FRICC) in creating an interconnected set of networks to serve the research community, two workshops were held to address the technical support of policy issues that arise when interconnecting such networks. The workshops addressed the required and feasible technologies and architectures that could be used to satisfy the desired policies for interconnection. The results of the workshop are documented

Nurturing the Accumulation of Innovations: Lessons from the Internet

The innovations that became the foundation for the Internet originate from two eras that illustrate two distinct models for accumulating innovations over the long haul. The pre-commercial era illustrates the operation of several useful non-market institutional arrangements. It also illustrates a potential drawback to government sponsorship – in this instance, truncation of exploratory activity. The commercial era illustrates a rather different set of lessons. It highlights the extraordinary power of market-oriented and widely distributed investment and adoption, which illustrates the power of market experimentation to foster innovative activity. It also illustrates a few of the conditions necessary to unleash value creation from such accumulated lessons, such as standards development and competition, and nurturing legal and regulatory policies.

Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech

The ACM SIGIR Workshop on Searching Spontaneous Conversational Speech was held as part of the 2007 ACM SIGIR Conference in Amsterdam.\ud The workshop program was a mix of elements, including a keynote speech, paper presentations and panel discussions. This brief report describes the organization of this workshop and summarizes the discussions

The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies

"The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has played a remarkable role in the creation new transformative technologies, revolutionizing defense with drones and precision-guided munitions, and transforming civilian life with portable GPS receivers, voice-recognition software, self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, and, most famously, the ARPANET and its successor, the Internet. Other parts of the U.S. Government and some foreign governments have tried to apply the ‘DARPA model’ to help develop valuable new technologies. But how and why has DARPA succeeded? Which features of its operation and environment contribute to this success? And what lessons does its experience offer for other U.S. agencies and other governments that want to develop and demonstrate their own ‘transformative technologies’? This book is a remarkable collection of leading academic research on DARPA from a wide range of perspectives, combining to chart an important story from the Agency’s founding in the wake of Sputnik, to the current attempts to adapt it to use by other federal agencies. Informative and insightful, this guide is essential reading for political and policy leaders, as well as researchers and students interested in understanding the success of this agency and the lessons it offers to others.

A Framework for Comparing Groups of Documents

We present a general framework for comparing multiple groups of documents. A bipartite graph model is proposed where document groups are represented as one node set and the comparison criteria are represented as the other node set. Using this model, we present basic algorithms to extract insights into similarities and differences among the document groups. Finally, we demonstrate the versatility of our framework through an analysis of NSF funding programs for basic research.Comment: 6 pages; 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP '15