Continuing Innovation in Information Technology: Workshop Report

The 2012 National Research Council report Continuing Innovation in Information Technology illustrates how fundamental research in information technology (IT), conducted at industry and universities, has led to the introduction of entirely new product categories that ultimately became billion-dollar industries. The central graphic from that report portrays and connects areas of major investment in basic research, university-based research, and industry research and development; the introduction of important commercial products resulting from this research; billion-dollar-plus industries stemming from it; and present-day IT market segments and representative U.S. firms whose creation was stimulated by the decades-long research.

At a workshop hosted by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board on March 5, 2015, leading academic and industry researchers and industrial technologists described key research and development results and their contributions and connections to new IT products and industries, and illustrated these developments as overlays to the 2012 tire tracks graphic. The principal goal of the workshop was to collect and make available to policy makers and members of the IT community first-person narratives that illustrate the link between government investments in academic and industry research to the ultimate creation of new IT industries. This report provides summaries of the workshop presentations organized into five broad themes - (1) fueling the innovation pipeline, (2) building a connected world, (3) advancing the hardware foundation, (4) developing smart machines, and (5) people and computers - and ends with a summary of remarks from the concluding panel discussion.