The Problem With Principles

Within the US government, the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s was a remarkable decade for experimentation with new federal institutions, some to encourage the development and application of new technologies, others to anticipate and control the undesirable consequences of those applications. In “A Nation of Innovators” (Issues, Summer 2025), Matthew Wisnioski examines this period of experimentation in the context of the profound changes then underway in American society.

He does so in part by examining the contributions of prominent members of what he calls “a cadre of technologists who had infiltrated the federal government,” and who released “with missionary zeal” a manifesto proposing “an optimistic future” built on “invention and innovation.” Wisnioski delves into a few of the ideological, political, and personal challenges, as well as some of the accidents of history, that tempered their success. Wisnioski’s larger project, as is more evident in his book on which this essay is based, Every American an Innovator, is to show how the concept of “innovation” has become a dominant theme in American society.

Wisnioski highlights a few of the many contributions of J. Herbert Hollomon, the driving force behind the “manifesto” and the initiator of many other efforts to institutionalize federal support for innovation. (I was privileged to work with Hollomon at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Policy Alternatives in the late 1970s and early ’80s.) Wisnioski gets Hollomon about right—brilliant, visionary, iconoclastic, exacting, and always moving forward. He uses Hollomon to illustrate how growing and diverse pressures from both the left and right “eroded a decade of liberal initiatives” around the time Richard Nixon became president and makes Hollomon a “casualty of these shifting fortunes.” Wisnioski says that Hollomon’s departure to take up the presidency of the University of Oklahoma, in Norman, “stood as a warning to future reformers of being perceived as a bureaucratic innovator.”

Hollomon told a different story of his departure. His story, which he shared with me and others, is that in late 1967, when he was serving as acting under secretary of the Department of Commerce, President Lyndon Johnson unceremoniously fired him when he told the president he could not campaign for his re-election in 1968 because of Johnson’s conduct of the Vietnam War. Hollomon was soon hired by Oklahoma, in part because of his reputation as an innovator and change agent. His tenure there, which was marked by controversy, ended when he publicly resisted occupation of the university’s campus by officers sent by the state’s governor to quell demonstrations against the war.

There was a lesson in the experiences of Hollomon in Washington and in Norman, but it was not that it was hazardous to be a bureaucratic innovator. Rather, it was that being a man with strong principles could be a problem. That lesson, unusual in Hollomon’s time, is now painfully evident in Washington every day.

Christopher T. Hill

Matthew Wisnioski highlights a Nixon-era effort to celebrate domestic inventors. This initiative reached beyond the usual elite scientists nominated for prizes and experimented with new approaches to federal innovation management. But I would argue that it is important to understand a matter the author does not address: how the Nixon administration and subsequent government initiatives and programs defined innovation.

Defining innovation is notoriously like nailing Jello to a wall: more energy goes into debating its flavor (i.e., finding a single optimal innovation method) than asking why we are trying to stick it there in the first place (i.e., the innovation’s purpose). Innovation, I would argue, is about meeting the needs of a defined customer or broader consumer or public. In the absence of that market pull, which relies on the assessment of people who have to decide if they will spend limited resources (money) on a good or service, we are left with ideas, inventions, and programs with no filter for success or failure.

The US Patent and Trademark Office now grants more than 326,000 patents annually. And while there is no precise global or even national count, estimates suggest that around 30,000 new products and services come on market each year. Some 95% of them fail. They range from “innovative” breakfast cereals for which we do not need government support to technology areas for which a complex array of basic research, translational efforts, proof of concept, pilot testing, and market scaling are necessary. In many areas, the basic research, translational work, and even proof of concept (not a linear process, I would hasten to add) happens only with government involvement. But whereas firms pull the plug on projects, whether because of technical failure or because they prove unmarketable, government projects lack market signals.

Wisnioski observes a missed opportunity for federal support of entrepreneurial partnerships and infrastructure projects. That is a timely message. But government projects, like their commercial counterparts, must be allowed to fall into the “valley of death” rather than linger past their relevance as public needs and consumer choices evolve. Both public and private entities have clear metrics for technical success versus failure. Private firms and investors respond quickly to market success or failure of products and services. As government industrial policy and technology become more integrated, tools such as surveys, participatory technology assessments, and regularly updated metrics of public value are essential for deciding which programs to end and which to advance.

Arthur Daemmrich