2016 AAAS Annual Meeting (February 11-15, 2016)

February 10 - 15, 2016

Overcoming Barriers to Technology Innovation in Established Economic Sectors

Americans excel at creating radical, innovative sectors such as biotechnology and information technology, but not at driving them into entrenched legacy sectors. The scale-up of critically needed, disruptive technological innovation in fields like solar and wind energy, digital patient records, the smart long-distance grid, driverless cars, higher education, and advanced manufacturing faces obstacles from well-defended technical, economic, legal, institutional, social, and cultural paradigms. These obstacles hamper growth, job creation, and sustainability in sectors that together make up two-thirds of the U.S. economy. Similar paradigms  inhibit radical innovation in Europe and Asia, despite direct government policies and programs to stimulate such innovation. Panelists will discuss obstacles to radical and disruptive innovation in energy, transport, health delivery, buildings, and manufacturing in the U.S.; in the energy sector in Europe, where context is critical to the direction and speed of innovation; and in the U.S. military, where the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is specifically designed to enable radical innovation and overcome deeply-vested technologies. These legacy sectors share systemic obstacles and market imperfections that must be addressed by policymakers in addition to providing more traditional support for research and development.