Events
CIIP Lecture: William B. Bonvillian
Monday 25 September 2023CIIP Lecture: Emerging Industrial Innovation Policy and Related Manufacturing Challenges in the US – William B. Bonvillian
17:00 – 19:00 Monday 25 September (lecture from 17:30 – 18:30)
IfM Cambridge, CB3 0FS
Title: Emerging Industrial Innovation Policy and Related Manufacturing Challenges in the US
Since 2020, the United States, confronted with advanced technology competition from China, the demands of climate change, and the need to respond to a global pandemic, has adopted a series of major industrial policy programs with over a half trillion US dollars in funding. The new programs focus on promoting technology innovation, so can be labeled “industrial innovation policy.” The large scale of these efforts amounted to a major new step for the U.S. in non-defense sectors, dwarfing previous efforts. This talk will discuss the underlying industrial innovation policy issues in the US, the nature of these new programs, how are they organized, and the implementation challenges, including in manufacturing, they face.
William B. Bonvillian
Senior Director, MIT Office of Open Learning; Lecturer, MIT
William B. Bonvillian is a Lecturer at MIT, and Senior Director for special projects at MIT’s Office of Open Learning, leading research projects on workforce education and technology issues. From 2006 until 2017, he was director of MIT’s Washington Office, supporting MIT’s longstanding role in science policy at the national level. He served as an advisor to MIT’s major cross-campus national policy initiatives on advanced manufacturing, energy technology, life science convergence and online education. He was an MIT representative to the President Obama’s industry-university Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) which formed U.S. manufacturing policies in the 2011-2016 period. He teaches courses on innovation systems and science and technology policy at MIT in the and Science Technology and Society and Political Science Departments. He is coauthor of five books on technology and workforce policy: Workforce Education – A New Roadmap (MIT Press 2021),The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies (Open Book Publishers 2020), Advanced Manufacturing – The New American Innovation Policies (MIT Press 2018), Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors (Oxford University Press 2015) and Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution (MIT Press 2009). His monograph, Industrial Innovation Policy in the United States was published by Annal of Science and Technology Policy in 2022. His new book, Foundations of Science and Technology Policy, will be published by MIT Press in 2024. He has written over 40 articles and chapters and spoken extensively about science, technology and innovation policy. Previously, he worked for over 15 years on science and innovation issues as a senior advisor in the U.S. Senate, and earlier was a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Transportation. He has degrees from Columbia University and its School of Law and Yale University.
He serves on the National Academies of Sciences Board on Materials and Manufacturing and its standing committee for its Innovation Policy Forum and has served on nine other NAS committees. He chaired the standing Committee on Science and Engineering Policy at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for from 2017-2021 and serves on the board of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. He is a member of the Polaris Council advising the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) on science policy. He was named a AAAS Fellow in 2011 and was awarded IEEE’s public service award in 2007.
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