avoid science in favor of other careers, then scientific progress and economic growth will slow,
especially to the extent that other careers do not provide the same positive spillovers for
economic prosperity that come via innovation. This selection issue suggests that various kinds of
support targeted to the young - though perhaps not major research grants - can provide
solutions.
Second, further issues are raised by the increasing narrowness of expertise and the shift
toward team production in science. The issues are partly a matter of evaluating innovations.
The evaluation of ideas is a central role of government that relies on the correct application of
expertise within government institutions. Evaluation is necessary ex-post of innovations,
particularly in securing intellectual property rights through the United States Patent and
Trademark Office (USPTO). Evaluation is also necessary ex-ante of innovations, particularly in
allocating limited research grant support through government agencies such as the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF). Traditionally, the USPTO
has used a single examiner to evaluate and adjust the property rights claims in a patent. The NIH
has employed a panel evaluation model within particular study sections, which cover narrowly
delimited areas of science. These evaluation models may be increasingly ineffective for
assessing broader ideas. While researchers and innovators themselves increasingly use teams
(and teams of growing size) that can span broad bodies of knowledge, their research ideas may
be constrained by evaluation systems that bring limited breadth of expertise to bear. In fact, the
NIH is actively wrestling with a perceived failure to fund “multi-disciplinary” research, and the
patent office has experimented with a “Peer-to-Patent” program to better aggregate expertise in
evaluating patent applications. These efforts are reacting to consequences of narrowness without
necessarily grounding policy initiatives in an underlying framework for how science itself is
changing or understanding how general these challenges are. Moreover, as knowledge
accumulates, the narrowness of individual expert evaluators will only increase. The basic
evaluation challenges, if unmet, suggest increasing difficulties in allocating intellectual property
rights and limited public research funds.3
3 Related challenges for journal article evaluation and tenure case evaluation are also relevant but will be left aside
here for focus.