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October 18, 2007
US competitiveness in S&T
RAND has put out a new report -- Perspectives on U.S. Competitiveness in Science and Technology. The report is the proceedings from a November 2006 conference sponsored by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. The conference used the National Academies' Rising Above the Gathering Storm report as a starting point -- from which the papers took their cue to move off in a number of different directions.
I won't attempt to summarize the papers here -- the introduction section of the report does a good job of that. There is one point that I would highlight, made most succinctly by Adam Segal but echoed in the other papers. Segal commented about the rise of technological capability in other nations (notably China), "The United States will also have to dedicate more resources to tracking technology developments abroad so as not to be surprise by swift technological breakthroughs. . . . Monitoring these developments, and exploiting them, will require a different type of training than more graduate students (and defense analysts) now receive."
That mindset of exploiting technology from abroad used to be a part of the American innovation system. Unfortunately, that seems to have changes with the growth of the “US as number one” thinking. After all, we were the most highly advanced nation on the planet. What could we possibly learn from anyone else? We taught the world, not learned from it.
With the new emphasis by companies on global innovation and open-source innovation, many companies are picking it up that mindset of "learning from others" again. However, many policymakers are still in the “not invented here” mode when it comes to technology development. That needs to change.
Posted by Ken Jarboe at October 18, 2007 8:07 AM
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