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Understanding Private-Sector
Decision Making for Early-Stage Technology Development
A “Between Invention and Innovation Project” Report
ABOUT THE ATP ECONOMIC ASSESSMENT OFFICE
The Advanced Technology Program (ATP) is a partnership between government and private industry to
conduct high-risk research to develop enabling technologies that promise significant commercial payoffs
and widespread benefits for the economy. Since ATP’s inception in 1990, the Economic Assessment Office
(EAO) evaluates the program to determine the returns to the taxpayer. To assess whether ATP is meeting its
stated objectives, ATP’s Economic Assessment Office employs statistical analyses, case study, econometric,
survey, and other methodological approaches to measure program effectiveness by evaluating the success
of individual, clusters, and the portfolio of ATP projects in terms of:
- Inputs (the funding and staff necessary to move the R&D effort forward)
- Outputs (project research result
- Outcomes (new products, processes, and services resulting from the innovation)
- Impacts (longer-run impacts on industries, society, and the economy)
EAO is exploring and testing the use of new methods such as analysis of networks, examining hot spot
technologies using sophisticated patent citation analysis, determining indicators of regional innovative
capacity, understanding the role of universities in spinning out companies, and exploring different
approaches for reporting benefit-cost results.
Key features of ATP’s evaluation program include:
- The Business Reporting System, a unique online survey of participants, which gathers data on an
annual basis on the business progress and indicators of future economic impact of funded projects
and on a biennial basis up to six years post-project completion.
- Special surveys, including the Survey of Applicants that addresses the counterfactual question of
what happens when projects are not funded, and the Survey of Joint Ventures, a one time survey
of joint venture projects funded between 1990 and 2001, designed to understand the benefits
of alliances.
- Status Reports, mini-case studies of completed projects several years out. Projects are rated on a
zero to four star scale, representing a range of performance from poor to outstanding on technical
success, knowledge generation and diffusion, commercial entry, and future outlook.
- Benefit-cost studies, which identify, assess, and quantify the net private, public, and social benefits
of ATP project outcomes.
- Economic and policy research studies that examine particular aspects and impacts of the program,
including the effect of collaboration on the research productivity of participating organizations and
the role of the program in the U.S. innovation system.
CONTACT ATP’S ECONOMIC ASSESSMENT OFFICE FOR MORE INFORMATION:
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Date created: October 7, 2005
Last updated:
October 12, 2005
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