By day, Erica Fuchs is a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. However, for the past year she’s also been running a pilot project—the National Network for Critical Technology Assessment—to give the federal government the ability to anticipate problems in supply chains and respond to them.

The trip from germ of a policy idea to pilot project in the National Science Foundation’s new Technology Implementation and Partnerships directorate has been a wild ride. And it all started when she developed her thoughts on the need for a national technology strategy into a 2021 Issues essay. Two years later, the network she called for, coordinating dozens of academics, industry, and government contributors to uniquely understand how different supply chains work, was a real, NSF-funded pilot project. In this episode of The Ongoing Transformation, Erica talks with Lisa Margonelli about how she took her idea from a white paper to the White House, and the bipartisan political support that was necessary to bring it to fruition.

Resources

Erica Fuchs for Issues in Science and Technology: What a National Technology Strategy Is—and Why the United States Needs One.
National Network for Critical Technology Assessment: Securing America’s Future report on the pilot project.
The National Science Foundation’s press release on the pilot project report.
Erica Fuch’s white paper for the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution: Building the Analytic Capacity to Support Critical Technology Assessment.

Turning a Policy Idea Into a Pilot Project

The Ongoing Transformation