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Towards a Culture of Application: Science and Decision Making at the National Institute of Standards & Technology

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Abstract

How does the research performed by a government mission agency contribute to useable technologies for its constituents? Is it possible to incorporate science policy mechanisms for increasing benefits to users in the decision process? The United States National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST) promises research directed towards industrial application. This paper considers the processes that produce science and technology at NIST. The institute’s policies for science provide robust examples for how effective science policies can contribute to the emergence of useful technologies. To progress towards technologies that can be years away, the agency uses several means for integrating the needs of eventual information users into the prioritization process. To accomplish this, NIST units, such as the Materials Science and Engineering Laboratory, incorporate mechanisms for considering user need and project impact into different stages of its scientific decision processes. This, and other specific strategies that the agency utilizes for connecting the supply of science to information demand, provide lessons for generating useable science.

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Notes

  1. http://www.nist.gov/public_affairs/budget/2009budgetpiechart.htm last accessed on 7/20/09.

  2. How do you make decisions about what’s the best stuff to do? How do you know when to break away from serving an existing need so that you can use the same resources—people and dollars—to tackle new needs for the next generation of technology? And that’s always a push and a pull here. But, given the resources, we have to make decisions when to move on (Heyman).

  3. These questions are absolutely necessary for figuring out what kind of science we should be doing, as a filter for projects that shouldn’t go forward. All activities in the lab go through this part of the process. These also serve as a mental guide to our staff. It helps them in their conceptualization of NIST goals, and relation of that to their own work (May).

  4. NIST has hosted workshops with representatives of the fire service, industry, and other laboratories to establish priorities for fire service research. Published results of these workshops have helped set the current research agenda for both NIST and USFA [U.S. Fire Association] (Bement 2003).

  5. What we’re trying to do to develop this common understanding. We try to describe the details of our mission in a one-page document. We have a lot of discussions across the laboratory that reach all the way down to the staff level. How do things fit?(Kayser).

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by grant No. SES 0345604 from the Decision Making Under Uncertainty initiative at the National Science Foundation for Science Policy and Assessment Research on Climate. The author would like to thank Roger A. Pielke Jr., Radford Byerly Jr., and Lisa Dilling for valuable input

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  1. Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 79 JFK St., Cambridge, MA, 02138, USA

    Nathaniel Logar

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Logar, N. Towards a Culture of Application: Science and Decision Making at the National Institute of Standards & Technology. Minerva 47, 345–366 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-009-9137-z

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