Building effective public R&D programs

Summary form only given as follows. The design of public research and technology development programs raises questions about issues such as key actors to be involved, support for constituency-building, the balance between fundamental and applied work, the role of large consensus-building projects versus smaller take-up projects, etc. Underlying the answers to these questions is the approach to the design of public R&D programs that one subscribes to. This paper sets out to understand the various approaches and their relationships. The paper firstly presents an inventory of program design approaches. Secondly, it analyses and maps the various approaches along the key dimensions of a framework for generic strategy development. Finally, in order to illustrate the analysis, the paper describes the approaches followed for program design over the years in the European Union´s ESPRIT information technology R&D program. This work has been done in the context of the preparation of the Fifth Framework Program of future European Union R&D, in particular in the domain of Information Society Technologies