In today’s innovation-obsessed, knowledge-intensive global economy, it might come as a surprise that for most of their long histories, science and business have had almost nothing to do with each other. Had you suggested to a silversmith working in ancient China, a captain plying the spice trade during the Age of Exploration, or a Quaker brewer in 18th-century Philadelphia that science could improve commerce, he would have looked at you as if you were crazy. Even today, describing the relationship between science and business — and figuring out how science and industrial policy can be designed to work to the benefit of both parties — is a challenge.