ABSTRACT
During the post-war period, national innovation policies in major industrial countries were built around a set of basic assumptions. One was that the production of basic science was a governmental responsibility and that science would naturally flow to industrial Arms and become incorporated into new products and new processes, through R&D activities in the firms; this flow would take place without any major inefficiencies and losses, even i f science was supposed to be an activity exclusively guided by academic curiosity. Business would be able to understand and seize the opportunities brought by the development of government-funded science. A second assumption was that mission-oriented R&D activities performed or funded by the state (particularly in military and space technologies) would have natural spin-offs on civilian technology. This was particularly true for countries like the United States, the United Kingdom and France, where defence R&D was a major component of the total research effort. Both assumptions supported a third one, namely that government only needed to give general financial support to business in order to maintain R&D activities; innovations would be at a sub-optimal level without government incentives because of their risky and uncertain outcomes. Except for specific missions, governments would remain aloof from the innovation process and leave the markets to choose the technology developments.
