不同国家不同领域DARPA模式的观察与思考——三思派对话《打造创新型国家》作者Rainer Kattel

【书名】：《打造创新型国家》

【作者】：[爱沙尼亚]雷纳•卡特尔、沃尔夫冈•德雷克斯勒、埃尔基•卡罗

【译者】：于文轩

【出版社】：上海人民出版社 格致出版社

【出版时间】：2025年11月

1、关于政府在创新中的角色

三思派：理论界长期争论政府在创新中应扮演何种角色。如果用最简洁的方式概括，在您看来，政府在推动创新过程中主要承担哪几种核心职能或角色？

Rainer Kattel：简而言之，我想这样概括：政府在创新中的核心角色不仅仅是矫正市场失灵，更在于构建并治理那些使创新成为可能、得以持续且对社会有益的制度环境。这意味着政府需要为长期研究提供资金、主动塑造市场、采购新的解决方案、引导发展方向、协调跨部门行动者，以及最关键的一点——建立能够随时间推移不断学习和适应的公共组织。创新并非由企业家或企业独自创造的，而是依赖于具备合法性、专业能力以及能够保持长期定力的公共机构。这就是为什么我们在书中提出：创新需要官僚制。

我还想补充一点，当今政府的角色已经远远超越了以往许多创新政策辩论的范围。在一个由人工智能、气候压力、地缘政治竞争和数字基础设施所塑造的世界中，国家不仅要促进创新，还须构建韧性。因此，真正的问题不再仅仅是政府如何促进创新，而是它如何在动荡的环境中发展出相应的实力（capacities）与动态能力（dynamic capabilities）来实现这一目标。这正是我们在工作论文中主张从“敏捷性稳定”（agile stability）迈向“敏捷性韧性”（agile resilience）的动因。

2、关于成功与失败的案例

三思派：《打造创新型国家》一书深入剖析了多个创新官僚组织的成功实践。在这些案例中，哪一家机构您认为是最佳的案例？其成功的关键因素是什么？此外，在研究过程中，您是否也观察到一些失败的案例？这些失败背后反映出哪些问题？

Rainer Kattel：如果非要挑选一个最能体现本书逻辑的机构，我会选择德国的帝国物理技术研究院——这是一个在19世纪末帮助奠定了现代科学和工业能力基础的德国机构。这一案例在今天鲜有人知，但它却是官僚制与创新相互交织的典型体现。它的故事展示了创新官僚组织的完整演变历程：首先是“魅力型网络”（charismatic network）的构建与制度创新；然后是将这种能量逐渐“惯例化”（routinization），转变为持久的“专家型组织”（expert organization）。换言之，它体现了我们所说的“敏捷性稳定”：即从非常规的创举向稳定的能力建设的转变。在当代，DARPA（美国国防高级研究计划局）当然是一个极其显著的例子，即便在那里，关键经验也不在于这个机构如何孤立运行并取得辉煌。其真正的优势源于一个更广泛的系统：采购权力、稳定的资金、大学，以及一个能够接纳不确定性的国家安全架构。

至于失败案例，我们的研究表明，失败通常不会表现为某个机构的突然崩溃，而是一个碎片化、空心化的过程，或是缺乏制度厚度的盲目模仿。在美国，我们描述了后期的“DARPA化”现象：到处散布着类似DARPA的创新“孤岛”，却未能重建更广泛的官僚实力，而这是使命导向型政策实现系统化所必需的能力。欧洲的模式则通常是有使命却无具备相应执行能力的官僚机构：口号响亮、项目众多，但用于规模化、协调和学习的中层机构却极为缺乏。这属于制度架构的失败。

3、关于制度移植的挑战

三思派：许多国家试图借鉴他国成功的创新官僚组织模式（例如设立本国版的 DARPA），但在实践中，这类制度移植往往成效有限。您在研究中是否发现典型的“复制失败”案例？要使此类制度有效落地，哪些本土条件或治理要素是不可或缺的？

Rainer Kattel：是的，这是我们发现的最清晰的规律之一。许多政府试图复制某种组织形式——比如一个DARPA、一个创新实验室、一个使命导向的小组——却未能复制使原机构行之有效的更广泛的生态条件。但成功的创新官僚机构从来不仅仅是“一个聪明的机构”。它们植根于政治支持、资金安排、采购系统、专业规范、技术人才以及更广泛的国家实力之中。当这些基础缺失时，被移植的机构往往沦为一种象征性的存在，而非真正的变革引擎。

因此，本土条件不可或缺，绝非做做表面文章就行的。它们包括政治合法性、长期承诺、免受短期绩效压力的保护、精英队伍、与大学和企业的联系，以及足以支撑跨组织协调的权威。这就是为什么我会对创新政策领域的“最佳实践移植”持谨慎态度。制度无法像蓝图那样被简单照搬，充其量只能作为一种启发式经验被借鉴。本书更深层次的启示在于，每个国家都必须立足于自身的行政传统、政治安排和战略优先事项，构建独特的“敏捷性稳定”版本。

4、关于使命导向型组织的当代意义

三思派：阿波罗登月计划催生了以使命驱动的创新组织范式。在当今应对气候变化、公共卫生、数字转型等复杂挑战的背景下，这种“使命导向”模式是否依然有效？您认为当前全球有哪些组织较好地继承并发展了这一模式？

Rainer Kattel：“使命导向型”模式不仅依然可行，而且比以往任何时候都更具必要性。但我们需要以一种不同于阿波罗时代的眼光来理解它。阿波罗计划是一个边界相对清晰、技术明确可解的使命。而今天所面临的挑战——气候变化、人口老龄化、公共卫生、人工智能治理、数字化转型——则更加开放和充满政治争议，且更具系统意义。因此，当代的使命不能简单地作为具有特定终点的英雄主义项目来运作，而是需要以组合、生态系统以及长期的制度承诺的形式来推进。

最能推动这一进程的组织，是那些能够将战略方向与学习能力相结合的组织。在我们的研究中，中国之所以重要，正是因为它表明了强大的中央统筹可以与去中心化的分散试错共存。更广泛地说，当代最有趣的组织并不将使命视为口号，而是将其视为一种组织公共能力的方式，包括资金、监管、采购、试验和交付等各个环节。这也是我们为什么认为那些最成功的机构正日益呈现出“新韦伯式”特征：它们将长期的合法性与专业性，同开放性、试验性以及网络构建结合在了一起。

5、关于敏捷的公共投资

三思派：当前科技创新快速发展，技术路径高度不确定，投资风险显著上升。从治理角度出发，政府应如何设计其创新投入机制，使其既能支持长期、高风险的探索，又能灵活适应技术创新的快速迭代？

Rainer Kattel：政府需要设计一种具有耐心视野、运作敏捷的资助机制。在实践中，这意味着一种“投资组合”策略：支持探索性、高风险和长期投资的组合，而不是要求每个项目都用短期回报预先证明其合理性。创新领域的公共投资应该视不确定性为常态。任务不在于消除风险，而在于智慧地把控风险。这需要分阶段注资、定期的学习反馈闭环、国家内部的技术评估能力，以及随着技术和战略格局变化重新配置资源的能力。

同样重要的是，资金机制不应脱离更广泛的公共能力。单靠金钱是无法催生创新的。政府还需要采购权力、监管的敏捷性、内部的专业知识，以及能够跨越部门壁垒进行协调的机构。本书的核心论点之一是，动态能力（capabilities）根植于长期积淀的实力（capacities）之中。因此，敏捷的公共投资仰赖于持久性的制度：即那些能使国家从失败中汲取教训，而不致陷入短期主义或政治恐慌的技能、合法性和制度深度。

6、关于新时代创新官僚制的新兴形式

三思派：当前，人工智能正深刻重塑科研范式，而地缘政治紧张又加剧了技术竞争与供应链重构。这些新趋势将如何影响传统创新官僚组织的运作逻辑？您是否预见到未来可能出现新型的公共创新组织形态？如果有，它们可能会具备哪些关键特征？

Rainer Kattel：人工智能和地缘政治的发展正在改变创新官僚机构的运作逻辑。过去，许多创新机构可以预设一个相对稳定的全球环境，并主要关注增长、竞争力或产业升级。如今，这些已经远远不够了。今天的创新官僚机构还必须应对战略依赖、数字基础设施、算力和数据瓶颈、网络安全、供应链风险以及技术主权政治等问题。换言之，它们不仅仅作为创新组织，还必须扮演韧性机构的角色。这正是我们的工作论文主张从“敏捷性稳定”向“敏捷性韧性”转变的原因。

我的确认为新型公共创新组织将会涌现。然而，其关键特征将不在于单纯追求新颖性，而在于融合。最有效的组织可能会更具“新韦伯式”特征：它们具备专业基础和合法性，但同时保持开放、网络化、具有试错精神，并且能够进行跨部委、跨部门和跨政府层级的协同工作。它们需要更强的内部技术能力，需要创新政策与安全政策之间更紧密的联系，以及为应对危机建立储备和缓冲机制的能力。未来需要的不是更少的官僚制，而是更有能力的官僚制：即在一个更加严酷的世界中，能够将方向引领、学习能力和制度耐心充分结合的公共组织。

1. On the Role of Government in Innovation.

Science Pie: The role of government in innovation has long been debated in academic circles. In the most concise terms, how would you characterize the core functions or roles that government should fulfill in fostering innovation?

Rainer Kattel: In the most concise terms, I would say this: the core role of government in innovation is not merely to correct market failures, but to build and govern the institutional conditions under which innovation becomes possible, durable, and socially useful. That means funding long-term research, shaping markets, procuring new solutions, regulating direction, coordinating actors across sectors, and, crucially, building public organizations that can learn and adapt over time. Innovation is not produced by entrepreneurs or firms alone; it depends on public institutions with legitimacy, competence, and the ability to hold a long-term course. That is why our book argued that innovation needs bureaucracy.

I would add that government’s role today is broader than in many older innovation-policy debates. In a world shaped by AI, climate stress, geopolitical rivalry, and digital infrastructures, the state must not only foster innovation, but also build resilience. So the real question is not simply how government promotes innovation, but how it develops the capacities and dynamic capabilities to do so under turbulent conditions. That is the move we make in the working paper from agile stability to agile resilience.

2. On Successful and Failed Cases

Science Pie: How to Make an Entrepreneurial State offers in-depth analyses of numerous successful innovative bureaucratic organizations. Among these cases, which institution do you consider the best exemplar of an effective entrepreneurial state? What were the key factors behind its success?

Additionally, during your research, did you also encounter cases where similar organizations failed to deliver results? What institutional or structural problems underlay those failures?

Rainer Kattel: If I had to pick one institution that best captures the logic of the book, I would choose the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, the late nineteenth-century German institute that helped build the foundations of modern scientific and industrial capacity. Today, nobody really knows this example but it is archetypical for the way bureaucracy and innovation are interwoven. It’s story shows the whole arc of innovation bureaucracy: first, charismatic coalition-building and institutional entrepreneurship; then the gradual routinization of that energy into a durable expert organization. In other words, it embodies what we call agile stability: the movement from exceptional initiative to stable capability. In the contemporary era, DARPA is of course a highly visible example, but even there the key lesson is not the brilliance of one agency in isolation. The real strength came from a wider system: procurement power, stable funding, universities, and a national-security architecture able to absorb uncertainty.

As for failure, our research suggests that failure often does not come in the dramatic form of one institution collapsing. More often it appears as fragmentation, hollowing-out, or imitation without institutional depth. In the United States, we describe a later phase of “DARPA-fication”: the spread of DARPA-like islands without rebuilding the broader bureaucratic capacities needed to make mission-oriented policy systemic. In Europe, the pattern was often missions without sufficiently mission-capable bureaucracies: strong rhetoric, many programmes, but too little organizational middle layer for scaling, coordination, and learning. These are not failures of ambition; they are failures of institutional architecture.

3. On the Challenges of Institutional Transplantation

Science Pie: Many countries have attempted to replicate successful models of innovative bureaucratic organizations from other nations—such as establishing their own version of DARPA. Yet in practice, such institutional transplants often yield limited results. Have you identified any notable “failed replication” cases in your research? What local conditions or governance elements are indispensable for such institutions to take root effectively?

Rainer Kattel: Yes, this was one of the clearest patterns we found. Many governments try to copy an organizational form—a DARPA, an innovation lab, a mission unit—without reproducing the wider ecology that made the original effective. But successful innovation bureaucracies are never just “one clever agency.” They are embedded in political support, funding arrangements, procurement systems, professional norms, technical talent, and broader state capacities. When those foundations are missing, the transplanted institution often becomes a symbolic layer rather than a real engine of transformation.

So the indispensable local conditions are not cosmetic. They include political legitimacy, long-term commitment, protection from short-term performance pressures, capable staff, links to universities and firms, and enough authority to coordinate across organizational boundaries. This is why I would be cautious about “best practice transfer” in innovation policy. Institutions do not travel as blueprints. They travel, at best, as heuristics. The deeper lesson of our book is that each country has to build its own version of agile stability out of its own administrative traditions, political settlements, and strategic priorities.

4. On the Contemporary Relevance of Mission-Oriented Organizations

Science Pie: The Apollo moon landing gave rise to a mission-driven paradigm for organizing innovation. Today, as we confront complex challenges like climate change, public health crises, and digital transformation, is this “mission-oriented” model still viable? Which organizations around the world do you believe have best inherited and advanced this approach in the current era?

Rainer Kattel: The mission-oriented model is not only still viable; it is more necessary than ever. But it needs to be understood differently from the Apollo era. Apollo was a relatively bounded, technically legible mission. Today’s challenges—climate change, ageing, public health, AI governance, digital transition—are more open-ended, more politically contested, and more system-wide. So contemporary missions cannot be run simply as heroic projects with a single end point. They need to be organized as portfolios, ecosystems, and long-term institutional commitments.

The organizations that best carry this forward are those that combine direction with learning. In our work, China is important precisely because it shows that strong central direction can coexist with decentralized experimentation. More broadly, the most interesting contemporary organizations are those that do not treat missions as slogans, but as ways of organizing public capabilities across funding, regulation, procurement, experimentation, and delivery. That is also why we argue that the most successful agencies are increasingly neo-Weberian: they combine long-term legitimacy and professionalization with openness, experimentation, and coalition-building.

5. On Agile Public Investment

Science Pie: Technological innovation is accelerating rapidly, with high uncertainty in technological trajectories and significantly elevated investment risks. From a governance perspective, how should governments design their innovation funding mechanisms to simultaneously support long-term, high-risk exploration while remaining agile enough to adapt to the fast-paced evolution of technology?

Rainer Kattel: Governments need to design funding mechanisms that are patient in their horizon but agile in their operation. In practice, that means a portfolio approach: supporting a mix of exploratory, high-risk, long-term investments rather than demanding that every project justify itself in advance by near-term returns. Public investment in innovation should accept uncertainty as normal. The task is not to eliminate risk, but to govern it intelligently. That requires staged financing, regular learning loops, technical evaluation capacity inside the state, and the ability to reallocate resources as the technological and strategic landscape changes.

Just as importantly, funding mechanisms should not be separated from broader public capability. Money alone does not create innovation. Governments also need procurement power, regulatory agility, in-house expertise, and institutions able to coordinate across silos. One of the book’s core arguments is that dynamic capabilities are nested in longer-term capacities. So agile public investment depends on durable institutions: the skills, legitimacy, and organizational depth that allow states to learn from failure without collapsing into short-termism or political panic.

6. On Emerging Forms of Innovation Bureaucracies in a New Era

Science Pie: Artificial intelligence is profoundly reshaping scientific research paradigms, while geopolitical tensions are intensifying technological competition and supply chain reconfiguration. How do you expect these trends to transform the operating logic of traditional innovation bureaucracies? Do you foresee the emergence of new forms of public innovation organizations? If so, what key characteristics might they possess?

Rainer Kattel: AI and geopolitics are already changing the operating logic of innovation bureaucracies. In the past, many innovation agencies could assume a relatively stable global environment and focus mainly on growth, competitiveness, or sectoral upgrading. That is no longer enough. Today innovation bureaucracies must also deal with strategic dependence, digital infrastructures, compute and data bottlenecks, cyber-security, supply-chain risk, and the politics of technological sovereignty. In other words, they must operate not only as innovation organizations, but also as institutions of resilience. That is precisely why the working paper argues for moving from agile stability to agile resilience.

I do think new forms of public innovation organizations will emerge. The key features, however, will not be sheer novelty. They will be hybridization. The most effective organizations will likely be more neo-Weberian: professionally grounded and legitimate, but also porous, networked, experimental, and able to work across ministries, sectors, and levels of government. They will need stronger in-house technological competence, closer links between innovation and security policy, and a greater ability to build reserves and buffers for crisis response. The future is not less bureaucracy. It is more capable bureaucracy: public organizations able to combine direction, learning, and endurance in a much harsher world.

Rainer Kattel（雷纳·卡特尔），伦敦大学学院（UCL）创新与公共目标研究所（IIPP）副所长，教授，《打造创新型国家》作者。本文由上海市科学学研究所李辉研究员采访。文章观点不代表主办机构立场。

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