How the Government Got Into Innovation
September 2, 2025
Americans today are fixated on innovation. Business leaders seek to discover the next big innovation, government officials push policies that will induce innovation, and the public often lionizes innovators. (This is a marked change from the seventeenth-century use of innovator to mean heretic—a charge that could cost you your ears.) Universities offer degrees in innovation and there are many, many books on the subject.
The federal government’s interest in boosting technological innovation is a relatively recent phenomenon. Matthew Wisnioski finds that in the 1960s, J. Herbert Hollomon, a bureaucrat who came to the Department of Commerce from a career in industry, “helped to integrate ‘innovation’ into the government lexicon.”
Hollomon’s efforts shifted the federal policy focus toward innovation “as a solution to poverty and infrastructure modernization,” Wisnioski writes. But government missteps and disruptive new technologies emerging from the private sector ultimately gave rise to a very different kind of innovation than the government-led model Hollomon had envisioned.