The Funding of Important Emerging and Evolving Technologies by the Public and Private Sectors

Abstract

We examine the sources of the finance that has enabled technological evolution, distinguishing between sources in the private, or for-profit, sector (FPS) and sources in the public or not-for-profit sector (NPS). We investigate the roles that agents in each sector have played, both directly and indirectly, in financing the creation and evolution of twelve major technologies that were innovated between the late 19 th and early 21 st centuries, many of which have been labelled GPTs. To document this, we describe the development of our selected technologies in some considerable detail. Although much of this is already well known, what has not been done, to the best of our knowledge, is to emphasise for all these developments the extent to which agents in the NPS and FPS provided the supporting finance. Studies of the physical location of R&D, inventions and innovations typically give heavy weight to the FPS and much less to the NPS. However, when we study the sources of the finance that enabled these technological developments, this greatly increases the relative weight attached do the NPS compared with that of the FPS.