Competitiveness and Technonationalism

Since its early development in the 1990s, nanotechnology's potential benefits have been discussed in largely economic terms. The most important claim has been that nations that pioneer nanotechnologies will secure economic benefits over those that do not. This assumption has justified much government spending on nano research and development (R&D) since 2000. Beneath these arguments about nanotechnology's importance to future economic performance lies a series of political-economic frameworks which have also come to dominate technology policy thinking since the 1990s. Principal among these ways of understanding the relationship between technology and society is the idea of National Innovation Systems (NIS).

NIS marries two older ideas: that technological innovation is the critical driver of economic growth, and that measuring innovation requires attention to more than just spending on research and development. According to NIS theory, several other factors need to be accounted for in measuring the capacity to innovate, and the correct unit of analysis for such capacity is the nation itself. This thinking has generated complex reflection on the health of innovative systems in all nations. While not all policy makers agree on the centrality or even the appropriateness of NIS as a tool to understand technology's role in economic development, NIS strongly shapes the assumptions behind nanotechnology policy in many nations in the 21st century.

In large part a response to the recession and stagflation of the 1970s, science and technology policy moved to focus more on the failures of American innovation to drive the economy. In a series of moves significantly motivated by Japan's competitiveness in the automobile and electronics sectors, the United States began to overhaul its federal research support structure, particularly its mechanisms for commercialization (e.g., the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 to facilitate patenting federally-sponsored research). As policy was steered by economic justifications, a new framework needed to be developed, and National Innovation Systems theory emerged to explain what elements were important in generating technological innovation. NIS theory continued the trend that the nation was the operative unit for the study of technological development, but sought a greater array of factors that played into successful technological innovation. R&D investment still mattered, but so did less quantifiable factors, like the flow of knowledge and intellectual property, science education at all levels, and institutional arrangements.

Nanotechnology has emerged in the era where NIS still dominates much innovation and science and technology [Page 112]policy worldwide. NIS's focus on the resources of the nation as the elements which should be manipulated by the state to generate innovation put the project of greasing the wheels of nanotechnology squarely within the sphere of science and technology policy. The outcome of this underlying framework is the re-emergence and even, at times, dominance of the rhetoric of economically motivated technonationalism in the 21st century. In particular, technonationalism is widely used to justify government investment in the nanotechnology enterprise. In nanotechnology policy (as well as other contemporary contexts), technonationalism is used in two different modes.

The first mode is a positive one, wherein policy makers claim a nation possess a particular advantage in their strategy to develop nanotechnology. One example of this version of technonationalism can be detected in Israel's policies. The Israel National Nanotechnology Initiative emphasizes strategic investments in the areas where Israel would have a “natural” advantage due to its small geographical size, well-developed national security state, and highly educated population. This sort of NIS capacity argument is common enough in most nanotechnology policy, since resources are always limited and must be strategically allocated.

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