Abstract
The first part of this paper describes one aspect of the attempt made in Britain during the years 1970–7 to orient government-sponsored civilian research and development more in the direction of national needs through the mechanism of the customer-contractor principle prescribed by Lord Rothschild.2 We shall be concerned mostly with the application of that principle to the Department of Industry (DOI) and its Industrial Research Establishments (IREs.). It is important to realise, however, that — although the Rothschild reforms refer mainly to administrative procedures in the DOI — the particular form that these procedures took has changed significantly both the locus of decision-making and the capacity of the department to direct research to specific ends.
This paper was presented first to a conference on ‘Government-Industry Co-operation in Technological Innovation’, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and held in Geneva, 6–10 June 1977.
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Notes
M. Gibbons and P. J. Gummett, Redeployment in Government Research Establishments, a report submitted to the Science Council of Canada, August 1975.
Department of Trade and Industry, The Non-Reactor Research and Development Activities of the Atomic Energy Authority and the Industrial Research Establishments of the Department of Trade and Industry Cmnd. 5176, (HMSO, 1972) p. 9.
M. Gibbons and P. J. Gummett, ‘Recent Changes in the Administration of Government Research and Development in Britain’, Public Administration (autumn 1976) pp. 247–66.
Department of Industry, ‘Interim Strategies of the Research and Development Requirements Boards’, Department of Industry, 1975.
Department of Industry, Reports of the Research Requirements Boards, 1973, ( London, Department of Industry, 1974 ) p. 2.
Department of Industry, Interim Strategies of the Research and Development Requirements Boards ( London, Department of Industry, 1975 ) p. 5.
See, for example, R. R. Nelson and S. G. Winter, ‘Neoclassical or Evolutionary Theories of Economic Growth: Critique and Prospectus’, Economic Journal, December 1974, pp. 887–9.
See M. Gibbons and R. Johnston, ‘The Roles of Science in Technological Innovation’, Research Policy 3 (1974) 220.
J. Langrish, M. Gibbons, W. G. Evans and F. R. Jevons, Wealth from Knowledge (Macmillan, 1972 ) p. 78.
J. Langrish et al. op. cit., pp. 66ff. See also ‘Success and Failure in Industrial Innovation’, in C. Freeman, The Economics of Industrial Innovation (Penguin Books, 1974) pp. 161ff.
J. Langrish et al., op. cit., p. 42; and Factors in the Transfer of Technology, in William H. Gruber and Donald G. Marquis (eds), ( MIT Press, 1969 ) pp. 11–23.
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Gibbons, M., Gummett, P.J. (1979). Orienting Research and Development to the Needs of Industry: The Application of the ‘Customer-Contractor’ Principle in the Department of Industry. In: Baker, M.J. (eds) Industrial Innovation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-03822-0_9
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