R&D for the Public Good: Ways to Strengthen Societal Innovation in the United States

The American innovation system has a structural imbalance that compounds quietly. Private R&D—concentrated in software, pharma, and now AI—has boomed for decades; public and mission-driven R&D, the kind that built the internet, GPS, and the foundations of the biotech industry, has shrunk as a share of the economy. The result is an engine superb at monetizable invention and increasingly thin where returns are diffuse: public health, climate adaptation, infrastructure, and the translational gap between lab and society.

01Where the system is thin

Three gaps recur in every serious diagnosis. Translation: federally funded discoveries stall before deployment because no actor owns the unprofitable middle—pilots, scale-up, procurement readiness. Geography: innovation capacity concentrates in a handful of metros while the talent and problems are national. Patience: quarterly-horizon capital under-funds the decade-scale bets—energy systems, public-health infrastructure, advanced manufacturing—where societal returns dwarf private ones.

02What strengthening actually looks like

• Mission-oriented funding: ARPA-style agencies—tolerant of failure, aimed at deployment—extended beyond defense and energy into health, climate, and infrastructure, with budgets that survive election cycles.
• Bridging the valley: testbeds, demonstration funding, and advance-purchase commitments that pull inventions through the unprofitable middle—government procurement wielded deliberately as the first customer.
• Regional innovation engines: place-based investment—universities, manufacturing institutes, broadband and compute infrastructure—that turns more of the map into participants rather than spectators.
• Talent pipelines: immigration pathways for researchers, technical education that does not require a coastal zip code, and fellowships that make public-interest R&D a career rather than a sacrifice.
• Open infrastructure: shared datasets, compute commons, and open standards—the rails on which thousands of actors can innovate rather than a few.

03The private sector's role—including ours

Societal R&D is not government's project alone. Companies hold pieces the system needs: infrastructure firms supply the compute and connectivity that modern research runs on; enterprises adopt and scale public-good technologies through procurement choices; and industry partnerships with universities and regional institutes move knowledge both directions. The self-interest is straightforward—every business operates atop the public-goods layer (standards, talent, basic science, resilient infrastructure) that this investment maintains.

04The stakes, plainly

Innovation systems are gardens, not machines: they reflect decades of planting. The United States is still harvesting the public investments of the twentieth century while under-planting for the twenty-first—and competitors are not making the same mistake. Strengthening societal R&D is less a spending debate than a continuity question: whether the foundations the next economy assumes will exist when it arrives.