Technology Forces at Work. Profiles of Environmental Research and Development at DuPont, Intel, Monsanto, and Xerox, 1998

July 28, 2017

Background

The environmental literature recognizes the importance of involving multiple stakeholders in the environmental policy development process. Stakeholders include a diverse set of individuals and organizations-local citizens and community groups, consumers, environmental groups, industry; individual companies,
shareholders, all levels of government and tribes, etc. In turn, each of these will have various perspectives on environmental risk, priorities, costs and benefits, etc.

One area of environmental policy that has not received a lot of emphasis in the past is technology innovation. Because of this, there is limited information on how one of these key stakeholders, industry, views environmental research and technology innovation. This report summarizes information about the following:

How research-intensive companies are rethinking investments in environmental technologies; where these companies are likely to invest, where they
will not invest, and where opportunities for public-private sector partnerships are; and
What federal policies the case-study companies would like to see to promote investments in environmental research and technology;

The work was sponsored by both the Environment and Technology Divisions of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The information contained in this summary is based on a series of interviews with senior environmental research and technology managers and environmental, health, and safety personnel in four research-intensive companies. The complete report that presents more detail on the results and the case studies of the companies is Technology Forces at Work: Profiles of Environmental R&D at DuPont, Intel, Monsanto, and Xerox, MR-1068-0STP, 1999, by Susan Resetar with Beth Lachman, Robert Lempert, and Monica Pinto. The results of this study should be useful for federal, state, local, and tribal environmental and R&D policymakers and scientists; industrial managers and planners; and university researchers.

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Originally created by Congress in 1991 as the Critical Technologies Institute and renamed in 1998, the Science and Technology Policy Institute is a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the National Science Foundation and managed by RAND. The institute’s mission is to help improve public policy by conducting objective, independent research and analysis on policy issues that involve science and technology.