Transforming Enterprise and Beyond:

Connecting Research and Policy in the Digital Economy

Invitational Post-Conference Workshop

January 29, 2003

at the National Science Foundation

Boardroom, 12^th Floor

Scheduled immediately following the Transforming Enterprise conference, this workshop examines prospects for strengthening interaction between the research and policy communities, recognizing that the complexity, novelty, volatility, and international character of the digital economy poses special challenges. It looks specifically at the methodological, institutional, and conceptual problems of making research on the implications of information technology accessible and useful to policy development at the national and international level. Participants will consider options for enhancing the infrastructure for research, deepening public understanding of technology-related change, and promoting informed debate and decision-making.

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Agenda

8:30 Opening Address – Russ Neuman, OSTP

8:40 Workshop Strategy – Brian Kahin (slides)

8:50 Introductions – Bruce Mehlman, OTP

9:00 Connecting Research and Policy: What’s the Problem? – Bruce Mehlman, OTP

Stefaan Verhulst, Markle Foundation (slides)

Brian Kahin, Maryland (slides)

9:40 Policy Context: Present and Future – Dan Chenok, OMB

Riel Miller, OECD (slides)

John Morris, Center for Democracy and Technology

Linda Garcia, Georgetown (slides)

10:40 Break

10:55 Challenges for Research – Wally Baer, RAND

Andrew Wyckoff, OECD: case study: measuring software (slides)

Sandra Braman, U. Wisconsin-Milwaukee (slides)

open discussion

12:00 Break to prepare for working lunch

12:15 Strategies for Connecting – Elliot Maxwell

Jesus Villasante, EC/IST (slides)

Milton Mueller, Syracuse

Suzanne Iacono, NSF (slides)

Comment:

Max Boisot, Open U. of Catalunya/Wharton School, Penn

William Dutton, Oxford Internet Institute

Prabir Neogi, Industry Canada

Dominique Foray, OECD/Dauphine University

1:50 Next steps – Brian Kahin

2:00 Adjourn

Bios for presenters, moderators, and discussants

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Like the functionality of the personal computer, the vast majority of IT-enabled change is hidden from public view. Some changes are easily measured, such as the growth of Internet or broadband connections. Some measurement problems command widespread attention, such as documenting the impact on productivity at the macroeconomic level. Yet most of the change is below the surface and not openly documented. It takes place within organizations and within economic and social relationships, in the fabric of transactions, communication, and knowledge management, and in the particulars of new products and services.

Within this world, entrepreneurs and managers faced a greatly expanded landscape in which business models proliferate and new forces are in play. For them, information technology provides a changing set of tools and infinitely customizable infrastructure. Data grows ever cheaper, information moves ever more effortlessly across borders and from context to context, while the most valuable knowledge remains sticky and opaque. Interactions among stakeholders, including businesses and consumers grow in scale and scope – and in subtlety. Capabilities are enhanced on all sides, at all points in the value chain. It is not clear who benefits most, by how much, and who may be disadvantaged as a consequence.

In a free market economy, these questions play out in the marketplace. Intervention is the exception that requires special justification, and new policy regimes are particularly difficult to engineer. (Domain name management is a rare but illustrative case in point.) In many situations, however, laws that protect against unfettered market forces are already in place – such as laws that protect privacy, intellectual property, competition, and consumers. The key question is whether laws that reflect balances of interest, values, and principles negotiated and struck in the past should be recalibrated to reflect changing conditions of the digital environment.

Prospects for Policy-Relevant Research

It may be impossible to assemble an empirically grounded framework to answer such questions in a timely and meaningful manner, but there may be value in trying. Most problems demand to be addressed first as business issues in the context of existing law before they fully ripen as policy issues. But if the perceived imbalance is great enough, policymakers will hear from those most directly affected and those with the most at stake. Empirical research that might inform the problem faces the likelihood of obsolescence or irrelevance by the time it is fully executed and validated. Nonetheless, policy problems seldom disappear, and even belated empirical research helps ground and objectify ongoing debate while providing a leg up for future research.

The problem of connecting empirical research and policy development is an extreme variant of the general problem of informing decision-making with research. Empirical research, especially academic research, takes time to fund, conduct, and validate -- while targets move quickly in the digital environment. Academic researchers are notoriously self-motivated, and their long-term trajectories are slow to change. Reward systems, including peer review, favor discipline-based research on an easily managed scale. Yet the need to understand rich environments with multiple competing interests may require teams with complementary expertise that spans disciplinary, institutional, and geographic boundaries, together with a high level of coordination and management. For short-term projects, consulting firms and thinktanks are likely to do better at meeting these requirements than academic researchers.

The academic reward system encourages communications to traditional disciplines rather than a multidisciplinary audience such as the policy community. It encourages publication in specialized journals, which may be difficult to locate and retrieve, rather than outlets likely to reach a broader audience or readily located and accessed on the Internet. However, many policy-attuned researchers submit pre-prints to SSRN and other accessible archives, or maintain their own archives on personal websites.

The advantages of academic research are its rigor, openness, and reusability. The research itself contributes to a public infrastructure for further research – scaffolding that can be used by future researches across the boundaries of disciplines, institutions, place, and time. This requires shared definitions, standards, and ontologies, which may be difficult to achieve in a volatile environment. Researchers can avoid this problem by drawing on existing sources of data, for which definitions and standards are already established. This is invariably less costly and avoids project management problems. But there is the danger that research will become too dependent on available data – looking for illumination where the light is, because that is quicker, cheaper, and less risky. As always, the inability to measure certain phenomena has the potential to skew research outcomes – as well as popular reporting on research.

Prospects for Evidence-Based Policy

Policy is developed through a variety of institutional processes -- judicial, administrative, legislative, diplomatic – sometimes operating in parallel or in dialog with each other. Yet few entities directly involved in policymaking have substantial in-house research capacity. What they have enjoyed has proved vulnerable to budget cuts -- or elimination, as happened to the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. Even if funds can be found, agency officials may be reluctant to sponsor new research when outcomes cannot be predicted and may prove inconclusive or controversial. It is generally easier to hold hearings and let invited participants provide their own research, which unfortunately may foster a perception of researchers as hired guns.

Skepticism toward public policy development peaked as the unregulated Internet boomed. The US Government argued in international fora for private sector leadership on the grounds that governments lacked the capacity to develop responsive and farsighted policy for the fast changing environment around the Internet. Much of this skepticism was directed against traditional telecom regulation, which, ironically, is formulated within an empirical framework. Yet the consensus in principle against premature policymaking did not preclude early intervention in other areas, including content control and intellectual property, where an empirical framework is lacking.

While the case is sometimes made that changes in the law should be based on empirical evidence, the status quo is unlikely to have been based on empirical evidence. Policy is path dependent and difficult to undo, especially to the extent it creates or advances economic interests. Business expectations crystallize around laws and regulations, creating a constituency against change. The more plentiful and diverse the stakeholders and issues, the greater the odds of inertia and paralysis. This is of course especially true for laws, since legislators have little time to address complex issues. Once difficult decisions are made, lawmakers will be resistant to reopening them until there is compelling evidence that something has gone wrong.

The high stakes implicit in the scope of economic and social change demand a deep and sophisticated understanding of the implications of information technology – and require that this understanding extend broadly beyond a narrow base of researchers and experts. If the policy assumptions under which we live, work, and invest are in fact unbalanced by change, we need to know. Creating and maintaining meaningful hard figures may be more than we can expect, but other forms of research can at least give perspective beyond the voices heard in litigation, hearings, and international negotiations.

The Workshop: Connecting Research and Policy in the Digital Economy

Following the Transforming Enterprise conference at Department of Commerce, there will be a half-day workshop at the National Science Foundation to examine the special challenges of connecting research and policy in the digital environment. It will engage a small number of participants with a strong professional or institutional interest in the fundamental problems of making research useful to policy development and policy development receptive to research. Topics will include:

- Fundamental challenges for research on the implications of IT: agenda setting, research infrastructure, interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaboration, international coordination, integrative analysis, policy relevance, and practical utility.

- Obstacles and opportunities in research-based policy analysis and development.

- Problems in the policy-level conceptualization of information technology and the digital economy.

- Programmatic strategies for research on the economic and social implications of IT.

- Cross-cutting problems and challenges in developing policy for the digital economy.

- Lessons in supporting policy development with research in specific fields and policy domains -- e.g., telecommunications; the Internet; telecommuting; intellectual property; privacy; competition policy; and e-government.

- Strategies for strengthening the relationship between research and policy; evaluation of Transforming Enterprise; prospects for future conferences and workshops.

The workshop will convene early on January 29 in the boardroom of the National Science Foundation in Arlington, Virginia (Ballston Metro); it will end early in the afternoon after a working lunch. It will be organized as a series of panels supported by a number of commissioned papers, summaries of which will be available to participants in advance.

Selected papers from the workshop will be published as part of the conference volume for Transforming Enterprise or, if circumstances justify, as a self-contained volume. Support for the Transforming Enterprise conference and the workshop is provided by a grant from the Digital Society and Technologies Program of the National Science Foundation.

For further information, contact Brian Kahin at bk90@umail.umd.edu

ver 2.6

26 January 2002