Technology Policy and Development

• Technology Industry in the U.S. National Capital Region
  In 1994, RR&S Associates conducted the first study of the technology industry in the U.S. National Capital Region for the Washington Board of Trade. The analysis showed that the size of the industry was as large as in the Silicon Valley but the culture within the National Capital Region was much different compared to other technology-intensive regions, as it was driven by government contracting instead of risk-taking investments. The geographic distribution of the technology industry in the region revealed consistent patterns with spatial dependency between the sources of contract-supported research and types of technology. For example, information technology (IT) and systems engineering were located in the areas of defense and intelligence concentration in Virginia while the medical and health technology industries were more prevalent near the National Institutes of Health in Maryland. Vertically linked businesses dominated both IT and health-related sectors outside Washington, D.C., while the central part of the city hosted practically no technology companies. 
  
• The Geography of Technology-Intensive Regions
  In the 1990s, there was great interest in the relationship between the physical structure of technology-intensive regions and the geographic distribution of technological companies. RR&S Associates conducted in-depth analyses of technology companies’ location patterns for several cities in the U.S. The studies showed that the distribution varied considerably depending on the underlying road and infrastructure patterns. Although it was not a major new finding, the studies demonstrated for the first time that this relationship was important and planners and policymakers needed to pay attention to this fact. 
  
• Measuring the Shape of Technology Companies Regional Distribution
  RR&S Associates developed measures and built software to estimate the spatial form of the technology industry and its relationship to the local infrastructure. This work enables comparisons of the degree of shape similarity among geographic objects such as countries, but, most importantly, it provides accurate information on the shapes of industry sector distributions, as well as types of existing geographic concentrations and clustering patterns with a possibility to measure network interactions within them. This information is important for planning and policy at all levels of government, as it allows monitoring the development stages of economic clusters and helps anticipate economic upturns and downturns providing an opportunity to plan in advance. 
  
• The Rise of Self-Innovation in China
  
  Since the late 1980s, RR&S Associates have been involved in monitoring China’s quest to build a self-innovation economy, one of the long-term goals of the 1978 Chinese Economic Reform, or the “Opening Up” policy. The general view of China’s  economic success is that it is a result of the country’s ability to use imitative innovation to build the world-largest manufacturing economy. In fact, the strategic approach embedded in the Chinese Economic Reform is that a sustained economy must be a self-innovating one.
  RR&S Associates provided initial assessments of and assistance to the nationwide policy to promote the development of technology innovation centers and incubators. This initiative was a part of the Torch Program that created large-scale “government venture capital organizations” to help finance the incubation programs and technology development centers. The overall program lacked success until recently. In a new effort to learn how to self-innovate, China declared construction and promotion of Science and Technology Centers as an important mission in the early 2000s. Along with this development came a growing interest in the innovation process and entrepreneurship. Later innovation centers became the focus of a new experiment. Some of them – especially in the Pearl River Delta (Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Hong Kong, Macau) and the Yangtze River Delta (a major part of the Shanghai metropolitan region) – developed and introduced significant new technologies and innovations that contributed to the growth of large globally recognized companies. Today, three Chinese information technology (IT) companies (Wauwei, TenCent, Alibaba) are among the top 10 globally with more in the making (e.g., DJS, started in 2013, has 60 percent of the global commercial drone market). 
• Technology and Economic Development in India
  Over the past 15 years, RR&S Associates have advised and assisted economic development in India based on technology, innovation and entrepreneurship. The primary sites for assistance were Bangalore (the first mover in the country for innovation- and entrepreneurship-led development), Hyderabad and Pune (the second movers). RR&S Associates made numerous presentations on campuses of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) on technology-driven innovation and entrepreneurship as well as on the design and operation of educational programs in entrepreneurship and innovation based on a vertical and horizontal integrated model developed by RR&S Associates. More recently, RR&S Associates provided assistance and evaluation for an Indian IT company, which implements an outcome education software system for universities in India and Malaysia with a goal to move this product into the U.S. market,