Science Policy
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SCIENCE POLICY Incorporating WASHINGTON NEWS and policy news from around the world.
Reports Warn of U.S. Decline in Innovation, R&D Investment The United States is facing significant challenges to its leadership role in science and innovation, and is in danger of being eclipsed by other countries, according to two separate reports released over the last few months. In December 2004, the Council on Competitiveness released the final report of the National Innovation Initiative (NNI), a bipartisan study involving the country’s leading technologists and industrialists, focusing on ways to re-energize U.S. competitiveness. And in February, the Task Force on the Future of American Innovation released its report detailing numerous troubling trends which indicate that the United States is losing ground in several key areas, including education, workforce, knowledge creation, and research and development (R&D) investment. Titled “Innovate America: Thriving in a World of Challenge and Change,” the NNI report defines innovation as the intersection of invention with the marketplace, specifically, how new technologies and ideas find their way into commercial applications. “Innovation fosters the new ideas, technologies, and processes that lead to better jobs, higher wages and a higher standard of living,” the report states. “For advanced industrial nations no longer able to compete on cost, the capacity to innovate is the most critical element in sustaining competitiveness.” Materials research plays a big role as a key enabling technology for innovation, particularly in nanotechnology and custom manufacturing, according to G. Wayne Clough, president of the Georgia Institute of Technology and an NNI co-chair. “We’ve shifted into a new era in terms of the adaptability of materials,” Clough said, where customers want to request composite materials with properties tailored to specific applications. The other issue is whether those materials will be manufactured in the United States or manufactured in other countries and shipped to the United States. “If the U.S. doesn’t have the right infrastructure for innovation, the talent, the venture capital environment, and the right facilities, this kind of manufacturing will happen elsewhere, and we’ll become a consumer nation instead of a producer,” he said. Although the NNI report calls for increased federal funding for R&D, Clough said that this is only part of the solution to the problem. “It is going to take a multi-pronged effort with the government, industry, the MRS BULLETIN • VOLUME 30 • JUNE 2005
universities, and the nonprofit sector all working together to address these issues,” he said. That is why the NNI study divided its findings into three broad categories: talent, investment, and infrastructure. Specific recommendations range from expanding professional master’s degree programs, and expediting visa and immigration processes, to strengthening the U.S. manufacturing capacity and creating regional innovation “hot spots” like Silicon Valley. Other recommendations include do
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