Confusion over innovation highlighted again: MIT gathering of top science leaders brings out some of uncertainties over role of cooperative R&D in boosting technological innovation

The conference was cosponsored by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Manufacturing & Productivity and by the National Science Foundation. It was held on the MIT campus late last month. It attracted close to 200 of the nation's top leaders in science and technology. Its aim was to examine cooperative research among industry, the universities, and government and to come up with a set of policy recommendations for consideration by decision makers within these three sectors. But through no fault of the conference's organizers, and through no lack of effort on the part of the participants, who struggled with the topic for two days, the gathering was only a partial success. Although the conferees did come up with some suggestions, they cannot be said to have lived up to the promise of the conference's program that called for "the identification of a rich set of alternative actions [that . . .] should make a substantial ...