Technical Innovation and Foreign Policy
EGR 492, Professor James Shinn
EGR 492 examines the impact of technical innovation on foreign policy. Students learn how private sector innovations in areas such as satellite imaging, global positioning, internet search engines, and pandemic vaccines have a profound impact on foreign policy. Students also acquire both theoretical guidelines and practical rules of thumb for dealing with technical innovation in an organizational context.
From a practical perspective, students learn the roots of these technical breakthroughs; how they are enabled and “nested” in other technologies; how innovations are selected, funded, and brought to market by firms; and how firms assess and grapple with the foreign policy consequences of their technology. Students learn how to think about innovation from the standpoint of senior managers and government regulators; they also become handy with decision-tree analysis.
From a theoretical perspective, students gain insights into the clash between regulatory policy and rough-and-tumble commercial markets, between national “public goods” and the hard realities of private profit. Students learn how firms, NGO’s, and government bureaucracies form shifting coalitions promoting (or controlling) innovation, and how these coalitions interact across national boundaries.
Who Should Take This Course
This course will be of particular use to students planning on employment or graduate study in international relations, applied engineering or life science, the regulatory side of public policy, or business generally. Students likely to do graduate study in law or business will find themselves better prepared to deal with the case method of learning; they will also be skilled in the methods of systematic decision-making, especially the use of decision-trees.
About James Shinn
James Shinn teaches courses on technology and foreign policy at Princeton. His current research interests include innovation, risk management and decision-making under uncertainty.
After serving in the East Asia Bureau of the U.S. Department of State in the 1970’s, he spent 15 years working in high tech firms, first at Advanced Micro Devices, an integrated circuit firm in Silicon Valley, and then at Dialogic, a voice processing technology firm, which he co-founded. Dialogic became the global leader in its market, both Microsoft and Intel acquired minority positions in the firm, and Dialogic did a successful IPO in 1992. Jim subsequently participated in several high tech start-up’s as an investor and outside director -- some very successful, some not.
Jim was Senior Fellow for Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations from 1992~1996, where he wrote or co-authored several books and publications, including Weaving the Net: Conditional Engagement With China (1996) and Fires Across the Water: Transnational Problems in Asia (1998), both published by the Council on Foreign Relations Press. His most recent book is Political Power and Corporate Control, co-authored with Peter Gourevitch, published by Princeton University Press (2005).
He has a BA from Princeton (’73), MBA from Harvard (’81), and PhD from Princeton (’01).