IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/scippl/v25y1998i2p70-86.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Technology policy in the 21st century: How will we adapt to complexity?

Author

Listed:
  • Don E Kash
  • Robert Rycroft

Abstract

Technology is becoming ever more complex and this has important implications for national technology policies. A major US policy challenge is how to formulate and implement policies effectively when innovation cannot be understood. Using a review of the complexity-science and evolutionary-economics literature, and six case studies of evolving complex technologies, this paper concludes that there are five common patterns which policy must recognize: seamlessness, diversity continuous change, lack of understanding, and the predictability of incremental innovation steps. The self-conscious development of a US national innovation system as a policy priority is important, because technology policies must cover all elements of the innovation process holistically. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Suggested Citation

  • Don E Kash & Robert Rycroft, 1998. "Technology policy in the 21st century: How will we adapt to complexity?," Science and Public Policy, Oxford University Press, vol. 25(2), pages 70-86, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:scippl:v:25:y:1998:i:2:p:70-86
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/spp/25.2.70
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kash, Don E. & Rycoft, Robert W., 2000. "Patterns of innovating complex technologies: a framework for adaptive network strategies," Research Policy, Elsevier, vol. 29(7-8), pages 819-831, August.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:scippl:v:25:y:1998:i:2:p:70-86. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/spp .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.