Developing the Unlimited Frontier: The Impacts of the The Second World War Research Effort on Post-War Innovation – Harvard Company School Working Understanding
Author Abstract
Throughout The Second World War, the U.S. government launched an unmatched effort to mobilize science for war: a newly-established Office of Scientific Research Study and Advancement (OSRD) went into thousands of R&D agreements with commercial and academic specialists, investing one to two orders of magnitude more than what the federal government was formerly buying science. In this paper, we study the long-run results of the OSRD-supported research effort on U.S. development. Utilizing data on all OSRD contracts and the patents they produced, we reveal that these financial investments had big results on the direction and area of U.S. creation and state-of-the-art commercial employment, setting in movement heap forces which formed the technology clusters of the postwar age. Our results highlight how mission-driven federal financial investments in a mix of basic and applied research study can foster domestic development and long-run technological development.