DARPA, ARPA-E and the NSF: Street -Level Bureaucracy and Radical Innovation in Federally Funded R & D

Professor Piore is the David W. Skinner Professor of Political Economy at MIT. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard University, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation under the direction of John T. Dunlop. He is director of the MIT-Mexico Program and an affiliate of both the Center for International Studies and the Industrial Performance Center. He was President of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) from 2007-2008. He is best known for the development of the concept of the internal labor market and the dual labor market hypothesis and, more recently, for work on the transition from mass production to flexible specialization. He has worked on a number of labor market and industrial relations problems, including low income labor markets, the impact of technological change upon work, migration, labor market segmentation and the relationship between the labor market, business strategy and industrial organization. His most recent book, Innovation, The Missing Dimension (with Richard Lester, Harvard University Press, 2004), argues for the role of interpretation alongside rational decision-making in the innovative process, and the importance of public space, sheltered from the pressures of the competitive market, in the interpretative process. The central themes in Piore’s work are the social, institutional and cognitive dimensions of economic activity. Piore is a member of the Executive Board of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-economics. He was a MacArthur Prize Fellow (1984-1989), a member of the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association (1990-1995), and a member of the Governing Board of the Institute for Labour Studies of the International Labour Organization (1990-1996).