As I mentioned in Wednesday's posting, the Center for American Progress held an event on Monday on Spurring Innovation to Lift the Economy (also see the video of the roundtable panel discussion). Like the patent reform discussion described on Weds, the innovation panel was an expansion of a series of articles on Regional Centers of Innovation in the Centers' new publication Science Progress.
The discussion highlighted a number of points in both the national innovation system and local economic development. MaryAnn Feldman discussed the importance of place (a theme she also discussed at an Athena Alliance event in 2004 - see Constructing Jurisdictional Advantage). Rob Atkinson discussed the need for a National Innovation Foundation (see earlier posting). Richard Seline described a way of centering innovation policy around Grand Challenges -- an idea I find intriguing as moves away from technology-specific innovation to problem-oriented innovation, which could be technological, social or organizational (see earlier posting on the FT Climate Challenge Competition).
A couple of points jumped out at me during the discussion. For example, Richard mentioned the generational change in university researchers - where the younger generation is much more interested in commercialization of ideas than the older generation.
The major new idea for me came in Tom Kalil's response to the papers. Tom formerly served in the Clinton White House as a technology policy aide -- so he knows the area very well. For the past decade, he has been with the University of California system, in the Chancellor’s office. Specifically, I was intrigued with his discussion of collaborative and open innovation. For example, UC Berkeley has a program to identify and help foster new ideas from their students -- see Big Ideas @ Berkeley Marketplace. The site matches student project with donors who can make the project work.
What struck was how far behind Washington policymaking was. I know I have sounded that theme repeatedly. But here was a case in point staring me in face. While we have all be throwing in policy pieces to the transition and advocating big technology policy ideas, we have really failed to confront the shift in innovation activities occurring out in the field. Big Ideas is an example of the type of activity we need to understand and support.
As a side note, this shift to more collaborative activity is something we at Athena Alliance have tried to get our hands around in our paper on Virtual Worlds. But Tom's remarks simply pointed out to me how much more we need to do.
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