Innovation Governance During Crisis: Lessons Learned at Warp Speed During the Covid-19 Pandemic

This work explores the dynamics in emergence, deployment, and execution of modern technoscientific initiatives in the U.S. government. I focus on the federal initiative that developed vaccine and other responses to the Covid-19 crisis. This included federal policy mechanisms used during crisis, political and financial risk in federal technoscientific solutions, and conditions for technoscientific solutions success. The focus on these dynamics during crisis response is an approach to understanding overarching governance of technoscientific initiatives in non-crisis times. The process of exploration includes a series of interviews with senior officials engaged in technoscientific initiative development. Two studies governed by the tenets of the Delphi approach were completed, one in 2020 with senior government officials engaged in Operation Warp Speed, and another in 2021 with former senior government officials involved in government-funded technoscientific initiatives including the National Nanotechnology Initiative, the National Manufacturing Initiative, and the Precision Medicine Initiative. These results were coded and then the data were triangulated and corroborated through the use of public media, follow up interviews, and fact-checking in the local Washington, D.C. policy network. This work reveals a series of theoretical, policy, and practical results. The theoretical contributions include that high profile technoscientific initiatives are undertheorized in Innovation Policy and Science and Technology Studies. This work also establishes an early typology of U.S. government technoscientific initiatives. In addition, this work suggests policy and practical contributions regarding federal responses to emerging crises, as well as lessons from crisis-intervention policies that might be useful without crises.