is little coordination by the government between the 

 determination of goals and objectives for departments 

 and agencies and production activities in the private 

 sector. Private firms compete for R&D contracts from 

 government agencies and offer services that compete 

 with those provided by the agencies themselves. The 

 actors in American R&D are separate institutions, 

 mostly nonhierarchical and relatively autonomous. 

 They act independently and competitively, and come 

 together by agreement in mutual self-interest. Link- 

 age does not occur through directives and approvals 

 but on the basis of competition and pluralism. Such 

 cooperation of public and private institutions is one 

 of the most original characteristics of the American 

 science and technology enterprise. 



These systemic differences underlying the archi- 

 tecture of linkage, in turn, shape attitudes of R&D 

 personnel. In the USSR innovation by order and top 

 down planning and management causes R&D performers as 

 well as their supervisory ministries to look upward. 

 They are oriented primarily to pleasing their own ad- 

 ministrative superiors in the hierarchy. Since they 

 are not concerned with the distribution and use of 

 their results, producers all along the innovation 

 chain are not output-oriented. They are, on the con- 

 trary, keenly concerned with inputs on the supply side 

 because this is where major uncertainties and problems 

 in innovation lie in the Soviet system. Furthermore, 

 the emphasis on functional specialization and organi- 

 zational separation tends to direct the vision of in- 

 dividuals and management bodies toward separate ef- 

 forts rather than the overall enterprise. As a re- 

 sult the whole S&T establishment is inward-looking. 

 Each performer takes a narrow view of his responsi- 

 bilities, tasks, and interests. 



In the American milieu of a highly consumer-orien- 

 ted society generally and with market pull a major 

 driving force for successful innovation, R&D perform- 

 ers are oriented outward, to satisfying their custom- 

 ers. Competition for customers on the basis of price 

 and quality makes output and use important considera- 



307 



