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December 07, 2005
Competitiveness Summit
Yesterday, I attended the public session of the National Summit on Competitiveness at the Commerce Department. Originally proposed by Congressman Frank Wolf, the summit appears to have shifted from a Congressional activity to an Administration event. The meeting was held in two phases: a public session with the official participants on the auditorium stage making statements about the issue, and a series of closed door breakout session where participants met with various Cabinet members. (See NAM press release for a picture of the public session.)
Unfortunately, I'm not sure if anything will come of this exercise. The Summit statement - prepared ahead of time - was a reiteration of what has become the litany in the high-tech community: more Federal spending for basic research; more science and engineering graduates; better training for K-12 math and science teachers; reforming immigration law to make it easier to hire and retain technically trained immigrants; better technology transfer to the private sector; and more attention to emerging advanced technology areas.
It is also a policy agenda that could have been (and was) written 20 years ago.
The public discussion added only a little to that agenda. While Commerce Deputy Secretary David Sampson mentioned the importance of intangibles in his opening remarks, patent reform was never brought up. Sampson talked about the need for non-technical innovation, but did so in the context of needing innovation in government practices and policies, not about fostering non-technical innovations in the economy. He did raise the problem of energy and health care costs as drags on US competitiveness.
While one participant mentioned the importance of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) in passing, the need to help MEP shift from manufacturing quality to innovation was never discussed. Only a couple of times did participants talk about the problem of getting the right skills at the production level; the entire focus was on higher education. And while one participant focused in on the critical issue of applied problem solving skills, the discussion centered on technical math and science education.
In fact, when a Congressman raised the concern that the movement of computer and engineering jobs offshore was scaring young people away from science and technology careers (because they don't see a secure future in those fields), his concerns were immediately discounted and downplayed. There are a lot of engineering jobs in this country, it was claimed; the problem is the lack of US graduates in those fields.
Unfortunately, this type of narrow focus dominated the meeting. Not doubt, all of the issues raised at the Summit are important. However, they are but a portion of the problem and they don’t necessarily address the newer aspects of our competitiveness challenge. What troubles me about the meeting is the dog that didn't bark: all of the issues that were not raised – at least in the public session. Let's hope that some of these issues were raised, and discussed frankly, behind closed doors.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at December 7, 2005 12:40 PM
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