Technical research innovations of the US national security System

• Ano de defesa: 2019
• Autor(a) principal: Rodrigo Fileto Cuerci Maciel
• Orientador(a): Marta Macedo Kerr Pinheiro
• Banca de defesa: Leonardo César Souza Ramos, Márcia Siqueira Rapini, Paulo Sérgio Lacerda Beirão, Rodrigo Moreno Marques
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Gestão e Organização do Conhecimento
• Departamento: ECI - ESCOLA DE CIENCIA DA INFORMAÇÃO
• País: Brasil
• Palavras-chave em Português: Innovation; Technological paradigm; National security; Scientometrics; Bibliographic analysis; Research evaluation
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/32338; https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6011-4016

Since the Second World War the US defense has been a major participant in the development of radical innovations in information and communication technologies, most famously probably the digital computer and the internet. A regularly present, but less known creator of R&D innovations is the intelligence community. To understand the role and impact of defense and intelligence-related research for driving innovations, using bibliographic analysis, we analyzed the scientific output promoted by the US National Security System and its impact on selected fields. Thus, this work was separated in two main parts. Firstly, with the aim to map the technological portfolio promoted by the US defense and intelligence agencies, we analyzed which technological paradigms were promoted and the development of these research trajectories over time. Thus, using bibliographic analysis, we clustered 82,239 scientific papers funded by the US national security system, published between 2009–2017 and retrieved from the Web of Science database, in research fronts. After that, we aggregated the research fronts into technological paradigms. Our analysis identified 33 technological paradigms promoted by the US defense’s sectoral system of innovation, such as quantum science and graphene as fields that could generate high impact in the new generation of radical technologies. The efforts of intelligence agencies was highly concentrated on quantum science, social forecasting, computer cognition and signal processing. In a second moment, we collected 1,525,328 documents from the Web of Science about Nanotechnology, Quantum Science, and Graphene, published between 2009-2017. These field were select because of their scientific and commercial relevance. Based on this new corpus, we compared the performance of the defense-related research with other kind of funding agencies. The factors analyzed were the following: degree of promotion of international collaboration, research impact, and research prestige. As result, we found that the US National Security System promotes researches of high impact and high prestige, with inconclusive results about the promotion of international collaboration. Our research highlights the role of US security players in shaping research fields showing that they are an active and important player in the current innovative landscape, a phenomenon that still need to be studied in depth.