DARPA

As an interaction design student, I often wonder about where technology comes from and where it’s headed. Many of the technologies we rely on daily—like the internet and GPS—were initially funded by government and defense budgets. So, who should be responsible for inventing new technology in the future? Should it be governments, corporations, or open-source communities?

Long-Term Investment and Public Interest

Government funding often leads to foundational technologies that prioritize public interest over profit. Since governments don’t face the same profit pressures as corporations, they can afford to invest in high-risk, long-term research that might not show immediate results. This approach can be beneficial for society as a whole, creating infrastructure that everyone can use.

Speed and Scalability

On the other hand, corporations have the resources and competitive drive to scale technologies quickly and bring them to market. Companies like Google, Apple, and Tesla are continually pushing boundaries in AI, hardware, and clean energy. But their focus is often profit-driven, which can limit access to technology or prioritize revenue over user needs.

Community and Transparency

Finally, open-source projects encourage a community-driven approach where transparency and collaboration are key. Innovations from open-source communities, like Linux and Mozilla Firefox, allow anyone to contribute and benefit from the technology. Open-source projects tend to focus on accessibility and user-centered design, aligning well with the values we learn in interaction design.

A Balanced Approach

In reality, a mix of all three is ideal. Governments can provide the initial funding and long-term vision, corporations can drive large-scale adoption, and open-source communities can ensure transparency and access. Together, they can create a tech ecosystem that benefits everyone—an inspiring idea for any design student!

Technology like the internet, GPS or other functionality were initially funded by government projects. Today, however, we’re at a crossroads, with governments, corporations, and open source communities all playing unique roles in developing new technology.

Who should take responsibility for driving the next wave of innovation?

I think it is alway us. Government is responsible for cover the basic for everyone(that’s the reason we pay tax, government’s funds should spent on “guarantee everyone(who pay the tax) life easy and convenient”, not leading the innovation.

“Should governments, corporations or open source ventures be responsible for inventing new technology?” My first thought was that no one should bear sole responsibility over inventing new technologies. In the case of an individual entity driving the creation of new technologies, there is a concern of whether or not their motives are ethical and if their decisions are for the people. In the past, we have seen examples of a singular organization having too much authority (or are the only authority) over a project… and it typically results in harm to the public interest. Innovation and invention should be a collaborative effort, where one entity can monitor the other and play a supporting role. Governments, corporations, and open source can all contribute in their own way, but it is also up to the individuals in each of these organizations to advocate for humanity as technology continues to progress.

By Micky Fang

New technology thrives when governments, corporations, and open-source communities collaborate. Government funding is crucial for high-risk, foundational research without immediate commercial value, as seen in the early internet. Corporations, with substantial resources, can scale and refine innovations, making them accessible. Open-source ventures, meanwhile, drive transparency, inclusivity, and community-driven progress, ensuring that technologies serve broader social interests. Ideally, governments fund foundational research, corporations develop it for the market, and open-source projects keep it open, transparent, and adaptable. By leveraging the strengths of all three sectors, we ensure that technological progress serves both society and economic growth.

I do believe governments, corporations, and open source ventures should be responsible for inventing new technology, but I also believe that limitations and restrictions to how these regulations are monitored should be set in place. A big concern I have especially with profit seeking corporations is how they might misuse these technologies for their own benefit without users knowing. The amount of information they hold with such limited oversight raises an ethical concern for me. On the government level, the use of public surveillance is also a topic I have mixed feelings about. Though I acknowledge surveillance is especially powerful in solving crime and recall events from the past, the 24/7 monitoring of everyday civilians feels dystopic. Though I also see a positive future in the various new uses of technology with the advancement of AI, medical technology, and self operating vehicles.

All three—governments, corporations, and open-source communities—have important roles to play in inventing new technology, and ideally, they should work together. Governments are well-suited for funding high-risk, foundational research (like the internet) because they can prioritize public benefit over profits. Corporations, on the other hand, excel at scaling and commercializing technology, making it accessible and useful in everyday life. Meanwhile, open-source communities bring transparency, innovation, and collaboration to tech development, often making it more inclusive and adaptable. By combining the strengths of each—government funding for risky projects, corporate resources for scaling, and open-source for collaboration and accountability—we can build technology that benefits everyone more sustainably.

I believe all three: governments, corporations, and open source ventures should work together to invent new technology. Governments can provide funding and support for research that benefits society, like the internet. Corporations can bring new ideas to life quickly, using their resources and expertise to create products people need. Open-source ventures allow everyone to share and improve technology, making it more accessible and transparent. I feel each group has strengths, and by working together, they can create better technology for everyone.

I believe that governments, corporations or open source ventures community should all play an important role in technological innovation. It is true that the investment of the U.S. government, corporations or open source ventures has laid a solid foundation for the development of infrastructure such as the Internet. However, there are limitations to leaving technological innovation entirely in the hands of a single entity, be it the government, corporations, or the open source community.

I prefer a pluralistic model of innovation:

A.Government: The government should continue to support basic research and cutting-edge technology exploration, and provide the necessary financial and policy guarantees for innovation. At the same time, the government should also focus on transforming research results into practical applications to promote social progress.

B.Enterprises: Enterprises, as the main players in marketization, are more capable of capturing market demand and transforming technological innovation into products and services. Enterprises should increase investment in technology research and development, while focusing on the combination of technology and business model.

C.Open source communities: Open source communities are an important force for innovation, promoting rapid technology iteration and popularization through open collaboration. Open source communities should receive more support and encouragement.

In addition to the three types of subjects mentioned above, individuals, entrepreneurs and designers should also have the right to invent and create. They often have unique perspectives and creativity that can produce breakthrough innovations in niche fields. This diversified innovation model can ensure the full utilization of existing resources, prevent large organizations from monopolizing technology, and promote the universality and development of technology.

The responsibility for inventing new technology ideally rests on a combination of governments, corporations, and open-source ventures, as each brings unique strengths to the table. Governments can fund risky, long-term research with broad societal impact, such as the early development of the internet, often focusing on projects that may not be immediately profitable but hold significant potential for public good. Corporations, on the other hand, drive innovation by investing in research and development to create products with market demand, often bringing technology to market quickly and on a large scale due to their resources and incentive to commercialise inventions. Meanwhile, open-source ventures foster collaboration and transparency, making technology accessible and community-driven, often focusing on niche needs or enhancing existing technologies outside of commercial interests. Together, these entities create a balanced ecosystem for innovation, where foundational research, market-driven products, and accessible tools can all flourish.

The government has a unique advantage in funding basic research and projects that bear higher risks, because its driving force is usually not direct profit, but long-term social benefits. The early R&D cycle of technology is long, the capital demand is large, and the risk of success is high. It may not be able to bear or persist relying solely on corporate and market forces. Therefore, government funding is very critical in laying the foundation for technology.

Enterprises usually have a strong momentum to bring technology to market, and are good at productization, meeting consumer needs, and rapidly expanding applications.

Open source projects and communities can promote innovation in a decentralized way, providing transparency, openness and cooperation for technological development. Through the contributions of many developers, the open source community can make rapid progress in refining problems, fixing vulnerabilities, and expanding applications.

The government, enterprises and open source communities each have their own advantages in promoting technological innovation. The government is suitable for funding high-risk, long-term basic research to lay the foundation for technology; enterprises are good at marketization and user demand-driven, and can quickly transform technology into usable products; open source communities promote openness and cooperation, and promote transparent and flexible innovation. The ideal model is a collaborative collaboration among the three.

shuoning Liang

I think, first of all, the government, companies, and open-source enterprises should be viewed separately.

Firstly, there is the government, which is essentially a management and violent institution. As a management organization, it should focus its main energy on how to further innovate its own country’s companies, while as a violent organization, it also must develop new defense and attack technologies with the core of safeguarding national security. But as for interaction design and cutting-edge technology, the government should not take responsibility for this part but should guide the open-source community and enterprises to develop new technologies.

As a company, I believe they have a responsibility to develop new technologies. When there are competitors in the industry, they also invest more funds in research and development for the sake of competition. The simplest example is the competition between Intel, Nvidia, and AMD, where they spontaneously develop new technologies in constant competition. Recently, Intel has even taken a gamble to develop low-voltage and standard-voltage CPUs due to the further development of AMD’s personal chips.

As an open-source community, they are born with new technologies themselves. For example, on Github, countless programmers publish their works, and this is a positive cycle where people constantly inherit the experience of their predecessors and explore new technologies.

– KY

Indeed, many key technologies were initially developed with strong government support, often for military purposes (such as the microwave oven invented during World War II). Historically, both governments and businesses have funded projects with clear or strategic purposes. For example, many useful inventions, from GPS to early computers, were originally created to meet government or defense needs. However, once these technologies enter the public eye, their uses will be infinitely magnified, rather than military purposes.

In my opinion, the responsibility for developing new technologies does not fall on a single type of organization, but should be shared. Each organization has unique advantages: governments can fund large, high-risk projects that serve the public interest, businesses often promote practical innovation to meet consumer needs, and open source communities promote collaboration and transparency.

But what’s interesting is that often innovative technologies and capabilities will lead to a tilt in resources to achieve advantages in business wars/strategies/decision-making/discourse. Not only from the perspective of whether to take responsibility for development, no one wants to be left behind, whether it is a company or a national government.

It is government subsidies, especially from the United States government and the Department of Defense, that give us modern technology. This tradition informed what we expect of technology as a public good, free and beneficial to all, but innovation has become much more complex. Private companies and open-source communities have become the technological powerhouses of the day: who will be held responsible for building tomorrow’s technologies?

The answer is not simple and clear, because every stakeholder has different strengths and difficulties. Governments with the resources and foresight to invest in basic research, some of which may not make a profit right now, but will deliver societal good. Private companies, subject to the demands and recompenses of the marketplace, can be great at developing new products as fast as possible for the masses and refining them as the market demands. In contrast, open-source communities offer a collaborative, open, and accessibility-focused technology for people. All of these organizations have a place in technology innovation, but to be driven by one would kill innovation in ways we don’t anticipate.

Government subsidies, of course, have long allowed for the big innovations that helped to establish modern technology infrastructure. And even the internet started as ARPANET, an experiment from the US Department of Defense to build a secure, distributed communication network. The government has often carried out the early research because they are willing to take on high-risk, long-term projects that corporations might refuse to take on because of the unsure returns. Government loans made possible GPS, MRI machines, even some early smartphone parts – all of which ushered in the change of life.

But governments are good at risky foundational research, but have trouble being agile and commoditised. Congestion in bureaucracies, funding pressures, political changes all can impede or halt promising projects. Here’s where private corporations have historically taken the reins. Armed with the tools and motivations to hone government-sponsored research into consumer products, Google, Apple and Amazon have taken base technologies and put them in front of consumers on a scale never before seen. But the side effects of corporate innovation can be also very real. Profit before all else can lead to choices that don’t always serve the public interest, be they privacy-related, monopolistic or ecological.

Enter open-source projects, a promising alternative by enabling technology to be open, flexible and, in many cases, free. Open source philosophy stands for openness, user participation, and shared ownership. Promising projects such as Linux, Firefox, Wikipedia and the like prove that a model that’s not so much profit driven as passionate, communal and knowledge-based is possible. The void often left by government and corporate programmes is occupied by open-source projects, solving specific problems or advocating for ethics in ways that the others do not. But open-source projects can’t scale or compete with big, pumped-up, company companies because of resource limits.

And the hope is that innovation’s future is not on the shoulders of one giant but on an ecosystem in which governments, corporations and open-source communities all act in synergy. Governments could target high-risk, long-term investments and provide a regulation system to ensure morality. Corporations could harness those discoveries into products that are offered to the public, with responsibility processes that take on public objections. Open-source communities can still be proponents of transparency, inspiring corporations and governments alike towards fairer, more moral norms.

In the end, such a balance is not only possible, but imperative to meeting the technicolour future’s challenges. Each has a distinct innovation function, and together they make a stronger ecosystem than any one could create by itself. Going forward, we must support collaboration and partnerships drawing on the strengths of governments, companies and open-source communities so that the next generation of technology is as innovative as it is inclusive.

In my opinion, there are benefits having governments, corporations, and open source communities each involved in developing new technologies. Making profits won’t be the first mission, more patience will be putted in researching and studying.

Also, corporations are great at taking new ideas and making them ready for everyday use, turning them into products quickly and focusing on making a profit. On the other hand, open source ventures make it possible for developers from all over the world to work together on technology projects. This teamwork is transparent and open to anyone, which helps speed up innovation and create stronger, more flexible technologies.

Indeed, the US government, particularly the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), supported and funded the development of the Internet. This support promoted the development of ARPANET, which became the predecessor of the modern Internet.

There is no single answer to the question of who should be responsible for inventing new technologies because technological innovation usually requires the cooperation of multiple parties. Governments, enterprises, and open-source communities each play different roles in this process.

Government: Governments often promote the development of technology by funding basic research, especially in the early stages when commercial returns are not clear. The government can also formulate policies to create an environment conducive to innovation, such as intellectual property protection, tax incentives, etc.
Enterprises: Enterprises usually focus on turning basic research into actual products and services and seek commercialization opportunities. They invest in R&D to promote technological progress and realize profits in the market.
Open source community: Open source projects allow developers around the world to collaborate on the development of software and technology, which promotes rapid iteration and technology sharing. The open source model expedites innovation and guarantees the widespread dissemination of technology.

The most ideal cooperative relationship should be mutually beneficial and efficient among the government, enterprises, and open source communities. The key elements include the following: the government should fund basic research, establish a friendly policy framework, invest in education and infrastructure construction, and protect intellectual property rights; enterprises should conduct applied research and development, promote technology commercialization, assume social responsibility, actively cooperate, and be open; and open source communities can provide a collaborative platform, accelerate technology iteration, reduce costs, and ensure quality. Overall, the three parties will achieve resource sharing, talent flow, convenient market access, and the formulation of common standards. This multi-faceted cooperation can not only promote the rapid development of technology but also allow the benefits of technological progress to benefit all levels of society.