The launch of Apps.gov, a new web portal for the federal government described by Ryan Singel, is a reminder of the power of spin-ons. The partisans of federally funded R&D are quick to tout the virtues of various commercial spin-offs of federal efforts, particularly military R&D spending and manned space exploration.

But as Brad DeLong and Stephen S. Cohen note in their excellent book The End of Influence, recent history has seen many more instances of commercial spin-ons, a subject that Jay Stowsky of Berkeley’s Haas Business School wrote about in a fascinating 1991 paper. Spin-ons, to simplify matters, are off-the-shelf commercial technologies that the military adapts for its own use. It turns out that commercial markets often did a better job of achieving technological breakthroughs that military R&D efforts at an acceptable cost:

The spin-off approach had created a domestic military-industrial enclave, inhabited by firms that organized themselves for the sole purpose of marketing to the Pentagon; this left them with business strategies and market antennae that were unresponsive to the strains of commercial competition and insensitive to the drift of civilian technological innovation.

If this doesn’t remind you of, say, the education or health sectors, you’re missing one of the central reasons why those sectors haven’t kept pace with productivity growth in the wider economy. Apps.gov, which allows federal agencies to draw on a wide range of commercial technologies familiar to personal and business users, offers a faint glimpse of what we might achieve if we opened up the market for public services.