Steven W. Popper

• PhD Economics
• Professor (Full) at Tecnológico de Monterrey

Selective openness is an R&D strategy in which firms allow portions of their technology to be accessed by other firms to attract adopters and supplier complements. While open-source software (OSS) has been widely embraced by software firms, it is unclear if open-source hardware (OSH) will be similarly embraced by technology-intensive manufacturing...

This report is a compendium of expert insights regarding opportunities for investing in science and technology to increase U.S. ability to engage in long-term competition in undergoverned spaces. This exploration marks an initial step toward developing a functional perspective on determining whether new approaches to strategy and engagement are war...

This report presents an assessment of the strengths and vulnerabilities of China's defense industrial base (DIB), conducted to meet a congressional requirement set forth in Section 1260C of the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act. We developed a methodology that can be applied to any country to assess the strengths and vulnerabiliti...

Lustick and Tetlock (2021) present a distinctive, persuasive case for theory‐guided simulation and its use in the intelligence community (IC). The usefulness of their insight can be expanded by recognizing the relationship between the forecasting project, the decision‐aiding project, and the knowledge project. We point out further issues for consid...

In this report, the authors examine the propensity within China's innovation system to realize its potential as an innovating nation: What is the balance of systemic forces that incline toward seeing that the innovation assets China possesses lead to innovation outcomes? They lay out an innovation conceptual framework for capturing the major activi...

Robust decision making (RDM) is a method for aiding decision making under deep uncertainty that uses models not as predictors but as generators of cases exploring assumptions and outcomes. RDM was intended for use with formal models. However, we show a model‐less RDM application to a portfolio planning problem (selecting U.S. Army security cooperat...

Public policy has always confronted future uncertainties. Projecting likely futures has been viewed as best practice for assessing proposed plans even though few would expect exactly those futures to occur. But in an era of deep uncertainties in which prior rules of thumb are no longer believed likely to hold true in years to come, sufficient dilig...

There is increasing interest in policies that can effectively address deeply uncertain conditions or developments.

This open access book focuses on both the theory and practice associated with the tools and approaches for decisionmaking in the face of deep uncertainty. It explores approaches and tools supporting the design of strategic plans under deep uncertainty, and their testing in the real world, including barriers and enablers for their use in practice. T...

Imagine that, in 2050, not a single person in the United States dies in a traffic crash. This is the scenario described in this article, in which RAND researchers set forth a vision and strategy for achieving zero roadway deaths by 2050. The authors propose that a combination of three approaches can realize this scenario. The first is doubling down...

Israel faces economic and social challenges. The government has not routinely developed and successfully implemented strategic responses to socioeconomic problems that demand longer-term, coordinated policy action. Effective means to respond to such longer-term challenges may require a more systematic government approach to policymaking. Researcher...

RAND Corporation researchers provided support to an Israeli government team of high-level officials charged with improving the processes for long-term socioeconomic strategy within the government. This report highlights selected inputs the researchers made to the government team to summarize the essential mechanics and roles for bringing a strategi...

RAND Corporation researchers provided support to an Israeli government team of high-level officials charged with developing a long-term socioeconomic strategy for the state.The report focuses on an aging population as an illustration of how one can use a strategic perspective in an analysis of policy choices. The researchers found that Israel will...

To successfully limit climate change, today's greenhouse gas mitigation policies should encourage reductions that will continue for decades. History suggests, however, that some policy reforms lead to societal changes that persist over the long-term while others fade without long-term effect. Current climate policy literature provides little guidan...

Israel has changed dramatically since its founding, especially in the past two decades. There is a public interest in having the police provide a type and level of service that keeps pace with these changes. Despite relatively low crime rates, the public in Israel perceives an increasing threat to personal security and concern over quality of polic...

Limiting the extent and effects of climate change requires the transformation of industrial, commercial, energy, and transportation systems. To achieve its goals, a near-term policy has to sustain itself for many decades. Market-based policies should prove useful in promoting such transformations. But which policies might do so most effectively? Ho...

New technologies continually arise that could be useful to DOTs and MPOs. This report presents a process (Systematic Technology Reconnaissance, Evaluation, and Adoption Methodology or STREAM) to compare these technologies to alternatives on the basis of their likely effects on agency goals, including consideration of barriers to implementation. STR...

This document assesses the opportunities and risks that the government of Israel faces in shifting to an energy mix increasingly dominated by domestic and imported natural gas. The analysis seeks to help the Israeli government choose robust strategies for exploiting the use of natural gas by minimizing the potential consequences of relying more hea...

This report assesses the opportunities and risks that the government of Israel faces in shifting to an energy mix that is increasingly dominated by domestic and imported natural gas. The goal of the analysis is to explore elements of robust strategies for exploiting the use of natural gas to minimize potential consequences from such risks. This rep...

Robustness is a key criterion for evaluating alternative decisions under conditions of deep uncertainty. However, no systematic, general approach exists for finding robust strategies using the broad range of models and data often available to decision makers. This study demonstrates robust decision making (RDM), an analytic method that helps design...

It is increasingly appreciated that models of combat and social-political behavior can be informative, helping us to anticipate possible future developments and the possible implications of contemplated actions. However, these models often cannot be relied upon to make predictions as accurate as those possible with models that have been developed i...

The project investigated techniques of computational support for devising shaping strategies and 'fusing', or jointly using, multiple different models representing relevant information and knowledge. A demonstration problem involving actions the US might take regarding Pakistan's Northwestern Territories and utilizing an assembled suite of models w...

Different approaches to deal with the long-term environmental problems to make the future secure are discussed. Analysts are adopting techniques such as scenario planning that involve exploring different possible futures rather than gambling on a single prediction. Policies are made robust on the basis of future scenario determined using advanced c...

Evolving Logic successfully completed a project to build upon its existing, patented Computer Assisted Reasoning system (CARs, (trade mark)) technology. CARs 2.0 allows users to generate compound computational experiments as well as to analyze their outputs. This is key to creating a capability that for the first time allows users to reason under c...

The United States government has not sponsored technology foresight as it has been defined and practised by governments in Europe, Japan and elsewhere in the world. [Foresight has been described in many places, but the original concept, as far as the authors are aware, was proposed by Martin and Irvine (1989).] [Different approaches...

Most futurists would agree that long term forecasts (35-200 years) are very difficult and many have been discouraged by the failure of the much-heralded Club of Rome Limits to Growth forecasts of the early 70s and the unexpected and sudden end of the Cold War in the early 90s. To celebrate the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 74 note...

Surprise takes many forms, all tending to disrupt plans and planning systems. Reliance by decision makers on formal analytic methodologies can increase susceptibility to surprise as such methods commonly use available information to develop single-point forecasts or probability distributions of future events. In doing so, traditional analyses diver...

There has been significant recent interest in Agent Based Modeling in many social sciences including economics, sociology, anthropology, political science, and game theory. This article describes three problems that need to be addressed in order for such models to become effective tools for formulating new social theory and informing policy debates...

Over the past few years, a novel approach to understanding complex and uncertain problems has emerged. The central insight is to conceive of any model run on a computer as a computational experiment. Instead of constructing and running only the single model that we believe best represents the system in question (after making various assumptions and...

The transformation of the U.S. economy over the past twenty years has made it clear that innovations based on scientific and technological advances have become a major contributor to our national well-being. The system that supports this process has emerged as one of our most important national assets, as important a source for growth today and in...

The National Science Board Committee on Strategic Science and Engineering Policy Issues asked RAND to provide a comprehensive review of recent literature and data sources on priority setting and coordination in federal R&D. The full review presents a synthesis of how the literature describes priority setting across fields of science and the issues...

The flood metaphor describes the situation the science and technology practitioners of Eastern Europe now find themselves in. The economic, political, institutional and cultural foundations upon which their working environment was predicted have been all but swept away. Especially for the East Europeans, who unlike their Soviet colleagues cannot en...

This report assesses the Soviet effort to improve economic performance by improving the quality of machine-building products. The author contends that the modernization program addresses only the symptoms of economic inefficiency, not the root cause. The senior Soviet leadership does not yet have an understanding that the goals set for the moderniz...

This report presents a case study of the investment program to modernize the Soviet textile industry. The work was undertaken as part of a continuing research program in International Economic Policy, the principal focus of which is to explore the connection between international economics and national security issues, within RAND's National Securi...

This paper provides an assessment of East European reliance on high- technology imports from the West. In section II, a measure to provide a relative scale of reliance on Western imports for a sample of commodities is calculated for each of the six East European members of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) as well as for the Soviet...

Labor has become a serious constraint on further growth of the Soviet economy. However, since 1970, the manpower demands of the Soviet military have increased. This report considers both the degree to which current military staffing levels can be maintained and the costs of doing so. It also discusses the reliability of estimates of Soviet force si...

This paper compares demographic data and information on the conscription and manpower management institutions of the Soviet military to estimates of Soviet military manpower levels. The paper examines the apparent paradox of increasing force size at a time of declining draft-age cohorts. Three estimates of Soviet force size are examined. The lowest...

The Soviet leadership has set a course of increased integration as a means to increase the capacity of the country-members of The Council for Mutual Economics Assistance (CMEA) to generate substitutes for Western high technology imports. This has been given form in The Comprehensive Program for the Scientific and Technological Progress of the CMEA...

This report, an overview of current East European reliance on technology imports from the West, assesses the importance to the East Europeans of these imports. The study develops a measure to provide a relative scale of reliance on Western imports for a sample of high-technology commodities for each of the six East European members of the Council f...

Three stories in this issue consider some of the most daunting challenges facing the United States and offer strategies to help the new administration meet those challenges. The cover story outlines a global agenda for the United States. Painstakingly bipartisan in its derivation, the story advocates "selective global leadership" in foreign and def...

The successful transformation of Eastern Europe to democracy and to market economics is not assured. Regional stability will depend upon resolving the general economic crisis. This makes the transformation process an object of policy interest for the West. The economic crisis in Eastern Europe stems from the inability of national economies to make...

This report assesses the potential for Eastern Europe to provide the high-technology products necessary to further the modernization of the Soviet economy. It examines both traditional trade in high technology products as well as recent measures to encourage integrated and cooperative technology development within the Council for Mutual Economic As...

At the dawn of the 21st century, the United States faces numerous, significant, long-term, and novel challenges, not the least of which is countering the threat from today's virulent new strain of terrorism. Frequently, both expert decisionmakers and lay citizens have trouble assessing alternative strategies to address such issues because of the em...

claims made that the analysis itself is definitive. Rather, as a proof-of- principle illustration (and of only one aspect of the larger Social Security issue at that) it is intended to make concrete and demonstrate the viability of a shared vision of process for assisting Congress that is implicit in several briefs that have previously appeared in...

The conventional wisdom on the accelerating rate of technological change is a truism, and might actually be truer than we realize. 1 In many respects, the changes to the fabric of daily life witnessed during the years from 1801 to 1900 were more fundamental than those occurring during the subse-quent century from 1901 to 2000. But the 19 th century...