William Boone Bonvillian

• Comment: The relevant standard is not whether there are third party sources to meet GNG. The relevant standard is WP:PROF., and that is normally met by showing the person to be influential in their subject as demonstrated by citations to their work. It can also be shown by honors, and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science is one of them. DGG ( talk ) 14:48, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

• Comment: This subject does not seem to meet our notability requirements for biographical articles. Please identify significant coverage in reliable, independent secondary sources before resubmitting. Consider also pairing down the article to it's most basic essentials - a Wikipedia article need not be a catalogue of a subject's life's work - it should highlight a subject's most significant work and clearly indicate what is the source of an individual's notability. Salimfadhley (talk) 10:07, 17 September 2020 (UTC)

• Comment: Using papers written by the gentleman is not necessarily useful for referencing purposes. Let me try to explain. If they manufactured vacuum cleaners, the cleaners would be their work. A vacuum cleaner could not be a reference for them, simply because it is the product they make. So it is with research, writings, etc. However, a review of their work by others tends to be a review of them and their methods, so is a reference, as is a peer reviewed paper a reference for their work. You may find WP:ACADEME of some use in seeing how Wikipedia and Academe differ hugely
  For a living person we have a high standard of referencing. Every substantive fact you assert, especially one that is susceptible to potential challenge, requires a citation with a reference that is about them, and is independent of them, and is in WP:RS, and is significant coverage. Please also see WP:PRIMARY which details the limited permitted usage of primary sources and WP:SELFPUB which has clear limitations on self published sources. Providing sufficient references, ideally one per fact cited, that meet these tough criteria is likely to make this draft a clear acceptance (0.9 probability). Lack of them or an inability to find them is likely to mean that the person is not suitable for inclusion, certainly today.
  Please take this firmly into account while awaiting a formal review Fiddle Faddle 17:13, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

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William Boone Bonvillian, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), is an expert on innovation and technology policy, authoring books and articles on these subjects. He is a Lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), teaching innovation policy courses in the departments of Science, Technology and Society and Political Science. He serves as Senior Director for special projects at MIT Open Learning researching workforce education. He was named for this work in 2011 and he received the IEEE's award for distinguished public service in 2006.

Education and early work

Bonvillian received a B.A. in 1969 from Columbia University, an M.A.R. in 1972 from Yale University Divinity School, and a J.D. in 1974 from Columbia Law School. Following law school, he was a law clerk to federal judge Jack B. Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York. After two years of law practice, he served from 1977-81 in the Carter Administration in the U.S. Department of Transportation, becoming a Deputy Assistant Secretary for the department’s legislative program.  He worked on passage of the Administration’s legislation to deregulate the railroad, trucking and aviation sectors. Subsequently, he worked as a partner at two Washington law firms.

Later career

In 1989, Bonvillian became chief counsel and legislative director to newly-elected U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman.  Between 1989 and 2006, as a senior legislative advisor, he worked on projects, including legislation establishing the Department of Homeland Security; reforming the national intelligence system; the Senate’s first major “cap and trade” climate change legislation (the “Lieberman-McCain” bills); on innovation and science and technology policy, including the America COMPETES Act of 2007. Throughout this period, he worked extensively on defense R&D legislation and policy, including for DARPA; as an advocate of the DARPA innovation model, he backed subsequent proposals for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), for the Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency (HS-ARPA) and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA).

In 2006, Bonvillian became director of MIT’s Washington Office, His policy initiative efforts included work on MIT’s energy policy initiatives, it’s project on the “convergence” of the life, physical and engineering sciences, on advanced manufacturing, and on online higher education. In 2007, he began teaching at MIT on innovation systems. In 2017, he stepped down from his Washington role , becoming a lecturer and researcher at MIT.           

Work on innovation policy

Bonvillian’s work on technology issues for the U.S. Senate and at MIT provided the background for his work on innovation policy and systems. Serving on the adjunct faculty at Georgetown and at John’s Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, as well as teaching at MIT, he developed and taught courses on science and technology and energy technology policy. He has written over thirty articles and book chapters on these topics, with a particular focus on the federal innovation policy role.

In 2009, Bonvillian coauthored the book Structuring an Energy Technology Revolution with Charles Weiss of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, a former chair of its Science, Technology and International Affairs Department and the first science advisor at the World Bank. While many experts had called for R&D investment to meet climate change demands for new energy technologies, their book attempted to open up the “black box” of the energy innovation system to understand its dimensions and rulesets. They proposed a detailed, multi-step approach for new technology development. Their approach called for to a new, unified, private-public energy technology strategy to foster needed energy advances. This emphasis on a technology policy was presented as a policy alternative, given that progress on a carbon pricing system faced political deadlock.

Building on insights from their work on the barriers to energy technology entry from incumbent fossil fuels, Bonvillian and Weiss authored the book Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors in 2015.The book described a systems approach to innovation, focused on overcoming two deep problems in the U.S. innovation system: expanding economic growth and raising the rate of creation of quality jobs.  It introduced and developed a new concept of "Legacy sectors" – complex, established innovation-resistant economic sectors that constitute most of the economy. The book set forth a conceptual framework to address what they argued had been a neglected problem in innovation theory, of bringing disruptive innovation to these legacy sectors. It added to previous models of the dynamics and stages of innovation, including the concepts of “extended pipeline” and “manufacturing led” innovation, focusing on the importance of the mechanics of “innovation organization” to technology advance. It identified new drivers to surmount the barriers legacy sectors create to economic growth, including the role of institutional change agents.

In early 2018, Bonvillian authored a book with Peter L. Singer, Advanced Manufacturing – The New American Innovation Policies.  Bonvillian had served as an advisor to MIT’s 2010-13 manufacturing policy initiative, “Production in the Innovation Economy,” which resulted in a two-volume study. He also served as an advisor for President Obama’s Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP), a consortia of industry university and government experts, which issued major reports in 2012 and 2014. These became the basis for administration’s major technology policy initiative and led to the creation of fourteen advanced manufacturing institutes.

The book explored the social disruption to the American working class, affected by a steep decline in American manufacturing from 2000-2010. The book reviewed the long decline of the U.S. manufacturing sector and the origins of the policy response to this dilemma, which came to be called “advanced manufacturing.” It traced the foundational policy concepts behind this approach, explored how, for the first time, an innovation system response was considered and developed to strengthen U.S. production, examined the key new policy mechanism, the manufacturing innovation institutes, and explored new workforce education efforts. e.

In 2020, Bonvillian, with Richard VanAtta and Patrick Windham, published a book they edited and contributed to, The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies. The work built on his long study of the U.S. government’s role in innovation and institutional mechanisms created to enable it.  The book collects the leading academic research on the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), including four of his own studies. DARPA supported the development of portable GPS, voice recognition software, stealth, autonomous vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles and, most famously, the Internet

Following up on his work on manufacturing, he saw the ongoing up-skilling facing the American workforce, so he turned to leading a research project on workforce education at MIT in its program for Open Learning, which develops online education courses. A book developed from that research, authored with Sanjay Sarma of MIT in late 2020, Workforce Education, A New Policy Roadmap. The work notes the growing economic inequality faced by the American working class, with technological advances putting quality jobs out of reach for workers who lack the proper skills and training. The book offers a roadmap for rebuilding workforce education describing innovative new models to train more workers more quickly being developed across the country.

Bonvillian has authored many peer-reviewed articles and book chapters that focus on topics of innovation organization, energy technology policy, advanced manufacturing, innovation in legacy economic sectors, the DARPA model, and workforce education. 

Other positions, distinctions and awards

Bonvillian serves on the National Academies of Sciences’ standing committee for its Innovation Policy Forum [1], served a seven-year term on its Board on Science Education, and on six other Academies’ committees.  He chairs the standing Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy (COSEPP) at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) [2], and serves on the board of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) [3]. He was elected a Fellow by the AAAS in 2011 for “socially distinguished” efforts “on behalf of the advancement of science and its applications.” [4]  He received the IEEE’s distinguished public service award in 2006 for his work advancing science policy in Congress.

External links

• Website