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US National Academy of Sciences' Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy


The United States National Academy of Sciences' Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy (STEP) is a board of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

The mandate of the Board is to integrate understanding of scientific, technological, and economic elements in the formulation of national policies affecting the economic well-being of the United States. The program’s focus is on the dynamics of the macroeconomic and microeconomic variables, their relationship to the industrial structure of the economy, effect on high-technology manufacturing and service sectors, and influence on U.S. scientific and technological advancement through examination of trade, human resources, fiscal, research and development, intellectual property and other policies. Policymakers responsible for these areas in the executive branch and Congress are the audience for the STEP Board’s work in the form of consensus reports, conferences, and workshops. The current Executive Director is Stephen A. Merrill, Ph.D. and the Board Chair is Paul Joskow, president of the Sloan Foundation.

The Academies began to address issues of U.S. competitiveness and innovation in the late 1970s and early 1980s through a series of industry studies by the NAE and broad policy studies by the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP).

A leading NAS economist, Dale Jorgenson, and NAE industrialists Ralph Landau and George Hatsopoulos were concerned that this work, and national innovation policy more broadly, did not sufficiently reflect the contributions economics could make to understanding of trends and policy prescriptions to improve outcomes. They proposed to the National Research Council (NRC) Governing Board of Directors of the NAS to create a new standing committee as a forum for dialogue among economists, technologists, and industrial managers to those ends. The Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy (STEP) was established in 1991, originally as an independent board with funding from the NRC and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Subsequently, it was combined with COSEPUP and Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable (GUIRR) in the Policy Division, at which time the Academy and Institute presidents were made ex-officio members to make the three units more similar in structure.

In composing the first slate of members, the Academies added a fourth category of expertise and experience – finance and investment – and took care to ensure that among the members were people with high-level public policy experience. Over the past 16 years the membership has included leading industrialists (Rube Mettler, Don Peterson, Bill Spencer), three Nobel Laureates (Mike Spence, Joe Stiglitz, and Jim Heckman) among many leading microeconomists, prominent venture capitalists (Burton McMurtry, Kathy Behrens, and David Morgenthaler), scientists and engineers from the Academies (George Whitesides and Vint Cerf), former policymakers (James Lynn, Mary Good, and Alan Wolff), and people whose careers have bridged the corporate and nonprofit sectors (Edward Penhoet) or industry and elective politics (Amo Houghton, Jr.). In STEP’s first decade the majority of industrialists represented heavy manufacturing and information technology. In recent years there has been an effort to recruit more senior managers from life science-based industries and services.


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