In "Leaving a Trillion on the Table," Photon Courier, drawing on an article from Spectrum, thinks about the invention of the transistor, and the lessons it provides concerning innovation policy:

When governments become involved in technology choices, they tend to pursue that which is fashionable at the moment...and in France in the early 1950s, that was nuclear power, not semiconductor electronics. Corporations, too, often pursue that which is fashionable or that which has short-term payoff. But in a healthy and innovative economy, the high-potential idea that is dropped by one corporation will be picked up by another--either an existing one, or a startup. (As Intel was founded by individuals who didn't think Fairchild Semiconductor was moving fast enough to exploit the integrated circuit.)

Research and development is very important, but it's not enough. For R&D to achieve results, there must also exist a culture which facilitates that commercialization of the new technology. Such cultures tend to involve a high degree of decentralization--either within an enterprise or across an entire economy--precisely because everything cannot be foreseen in a master plan.

Unfortunately, it appears that many individuals in leadership positions fail to grasp the importance of decentralization and individual entrepreneurship--especially in government and especially in Europe. See this rather depressing document called Creating an Innovative Europe (referenced in Michael Mandel's post here) which contains language like:

Large scale strategic actions are called for in key sectors to provide an environment in which supply-side measures for research investment can be combined with the process of creating a demand and a market.

The Group identifies several examples: e-Health, Pharmaceuticals, Energy, Environment, Transport and Logistics, Security, and Digital Content.

They call for an independent High Level Coordinator to be appointed to orchestrate European action in each area across Member States, different parts of government and the Commission, business, academia and other stakeholders.

Would such a document, written in 1950, have identified "semiconductor electronics' as a "key sector?" It seems unlikely, based on the experience of Matare and Welker. And, even if the planners had had the vision to understand the importance of the transistor, would a top-down process involving "stakeholders" (like incumbent vacuum-tube manufacturers) have ever permitted it to leave the lab for the production floor?

The link came from a comment on a ShrinkWrapped post, which also has some good observations on innovation and public policy:

True creativity is a rare trait. The number of people who have discovered truly new insights into the nature of reality are so few as to be memorialized as giants. From the tiny number of people who discover such revolutionary and dramatic insights, a still small army of bright and talented people can then develop the ideas and make them meaningful and important to all of us. This is essentially how technological progress ends up benefiting all of us, as fundamental science makes the transition to technology.

As an example, building on previous work at Bell labs, William Shockley, in 1950, built the first of what became known as transistors. 56 years later, the grandchildren of those Bell lab pioneers are blogging, communicating with strangers around the world without having to know how they are doing it or what enables their computers to connect to so many. The genius of liberal democracy wedded with capitalism has been to create conditions under which that small fraction can develop their ideas and ultimately share them with the rest of us, often in unpredictable ways. In essence, America rewards revolutionaries. True insights, in any field, threaten to overturn established paradigms, and change is always potentially destabilizing. Whether we are discussing a mutative interpretation to a patient that threatens to cause him to question his unconscious verities, or scientific data that threatens to overturn established paradigms, change is difficult to negotiate.

Note that nowhere in this history was there any problem that information was locked up by patents, or unavailable to the creative commons, or any other way restricted by property rights. The problems were failures of vision, and failures to understand how to capitalize on the inventions. And in the end the development occurred because people who did see the possibilities were able to use property rights and markets to create profitable businesses. It did not come from wise governments or, heaven help us, law professors' magisterial vision of a creative commonality.

Commonses and public goods certainly have an important role -- note the link to Wikipedia above, useful even if it is largely a compendium of information already produced by markets -- but, again, markets and property rights are not antithetical to community. They are methods used by communities to cooperate.