Accelerating Innovation

The 21st Century Competitiveness Act of 2007 Advances in the House

On May 21, the House combined several bills into one comprehensive package called the 21^st Century Competitiveness Act of 2007 (H.R. 2272) and approved it. While the House and Senate have passed different measures, both chambers have advanced forward increased authorizations for research funding and created new programs.

The five bills that have previously passed the House of Representatives by wide bi-partisan margins and were amalgamated into H.R. 2272 are:

1) 10,000 Teachers, 10 Million Minds Science and Math Scholarship Act (H.R. 362).

2) Sowing the Seeds Through Science and Engineering Research Act (H.R. 363).

3) National Science Foundation Authorization Act of 2007 (H.R. 1867).

4) Technology Innovation and Manufacturing Stimulation Act of 2007 (H.R. 1868)

5) Amendment to the High-Performance Computing Act of 1991 (H.R. 28).

The House legislative package authorizes a total of $23.6 billion over fiscal years 2008 – 2010, including $21 billion for research and education programs at the National Science Foundation (NSF), $2.5 billion for the research labs, the Manufacturing Extension Partnership and other activities at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), and $96 million for early career awards and teacher professional development programs at the Department of Energy (DOE). An additional $70 million is authorized for these programs at DOE for fiscal years 2011-2012.

“Keeping America competitive begins with a high-quality education system and follows with investments in ideas and people here at home. With H.R. 2272, the Science and Technology Committee has done just that,” said Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation Chairman David Wu (D-OR).

Provisions in H.R. 2272 include:

· Keeps the National Science Foundation and the NIST research Labs on a 10-year doubling path;

· Helps to create thousands of new teachers and provide current teachers with content and pedagogical expertise in their area of teaching;

· Expands programs to enhance the undergraduate education of the future science and engineering workforce;

· Expands early career grant programs for outstanding young investigators at both the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy;

· Strengthens interagency planning and coordination for research infrastructure and information technology.

“In this increasingly competitive world, where manufacturing jobs are rapidly being outsourced and we are importing more high-tech products than we are exporting, now is the time for us to act. We must strengthen our support for the creativity, innovation and talented workforce that makes the U.S. unique and gives us our edge,” emphasized House Committee on Science and Technology Chairman Bart Gordon (D-TN). “The day our universities are no longer the most sought after in the world, the day we see a brain drain because our best and brightest young scientists and entrepreneurs can’t get the funding to do their research and development here at home, the day our innovation is outsourced – that is the day that worries me.”

See H.R. 2272 on THOMAS for the official source of information on this bill.

IMD Survey of Most Competitive Nations: US Is Number One, Others In The Race

 

Business Week Reports on IMD Survey of Most Competitive Nations.

The annual IMD survey of the world's most competitive economies finds the U.S. still No. 1, but dozens of others are catching up

The 19th annual World Competitiveness Yearbook, published by the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), a leading business school in Lausanne, Switzerland, contains some surprises—and serves as a wake-up call to countries aiming to remain competitive in the 21st century.
Once again, the U.S. tops the list of 55 countries, as it did in 2006 and has for the past fourteen years. Close behind were Singapore (2) and Hong Kong (3), which have jockeyed for the runner-up spot since 2004. But in the words of IMD professor Stéphane Garelli, "emerging nations are quickly catching up in competitiveness." He notes that 39 nations have increased or maintained their competitiveness vs. the U.S., while only 15 have declined.
The results are drawn from an extensive survey of 323 criteria, ranging from gross domestic product growth and exports to computers per capita and high school graduation rates. Two-thirds of the criteria are hard numbers, gathered from sources such as the World Bank, the U.N., and the World Health Organization. The remaining third are qualitative responses to an annual survey conducted by IMD that touches on subjects such as corruption, cultural openness, and language skills.
Click on for a tour of this year's top dozen countries.

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/07/05/0511_mostc...

(Note: Figures for per-capita GDP and GDP growth are for 2006.)

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Interactive Table: Comparing Competitiveness

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Most Entrepreneurial Countries in the World

Geoff Lewis in a Fortune Small Business article reports on his quest to find the most entrepreneurial nations.

“Our quest for startup-friendly countries began with the World Bank's Doing Business reports (doingbusiness.org), which every year measure the entrepreneurial climate of 175 nations in two ways: starting and operating a business. But the lists give an incomplete picture. France, for example, ranks in the top 10% for ease of starting a business and in the top fifth for operating one, but it has notoriously low rates of entrepreneurship.

Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), an annual study produced by Babson College and the London Business School. Its 2007 High Growth Entrepreneurship Report (gemconsortium.org), due this month, gave us what we needed: a glimpse at national rates of high-expectation entrepreneurship - how many American-style entrepreneurs a country produces.”

LINK: Who in the world is entrepreneurial? May 23: We scan the globe to uncover which countries are the most - and least - friendly to small business.  (more)

Innovation Journalism, Innovative Journalism

Just returned from the FOURTH CONFERENCE ON INNOVATION JOURNALISM held this week at Stanford University. Fascinating and eclectic group of the traditional and the unconventional. My take away is that journalists and the broadly defined media industry will play a powerful role in creating collective attention and consciousness about innovation in the years ahead. With the rapid development of web based media such as podcasts, social networking, wikis, collaborative tools, open source, the influence of innovation journalism will only accelerate. Most innovation reporting today appears focused on entrepreneurs, products and services and very geeky technical underpinnings—invention, not innovation. The politics and consequences of innovation is getting traction around issues such as stem cell, global warming, energy alternatives, nano and bio technologies, etc. And there seems to be growing interest to report on intangible assets such as IP, branding, reputation and human capital and how these factors play into innovation and creation of economic value. Also what factors make an innovative regional economy (e.g. Silicon Valley)? However there is little journalism done on the innovation process itself which is profoundly changing. David Nordfors, the conference chair and organizer (along with Swedish/VINNOVA colleague Jan Sandred) suggests we need better maps of innovation networks and ecosystems on a global basis. Couldn’t agree more. I see a rich vein for journalists to probe for facts, insights, metrics, personalities and opinion in the nodes, intersections and process dynamics of innovation geographies and networks. Doug Englebart had a particularly inspiring presentation on augmenting societies collective IQ. It was nice to reconnect with Doug after many years when I worked at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International) at the same time. He introduced me to the first mouse. I suspect conference presentations will be posted to the site soon. Check out: www.innovationjournalism.org

Record Results for Live Intellectual Property Auction

Mike Docherty reports on the results of the Ocean Tomo intellectual property auction.  A record-setting $11.4 million in patents were transacted in this single day live auction event.  These auctions are becoming a regular twice-per-year event for Ocean Tomo and are now also being expanded globally. A single lot focused on video-on-demand received a winning bid of over $3 million and one for mobile social networks (a methods patent) received a winning bid of $2.8 million.  Read the press release for more info. It will be interesting to see how much of the effort from these new patent owners goes toward commercialization and value creation, and how much goes toward enforcement against current players in these markets!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 26th, 2007 at 7:40 am and is filed under BoK: Technology and IP, Inventors / Invention, Open Innovation.

Senate Passes AMERICA COMPETES ACT with Strong Bi-Partisan Support

The United States Senate on April 25 passed by an overwhelming majority (88-8) S. 761, the America COMPETES Act. The authorizing legislation focuses on three primary areas of importance to maintain and improve America’s innovation in the 21^st Century: (1) increasing research investment, (2) strengthening educational opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics from elementary through graduate school, and (3) developing an innovation infrastructure.

Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) along with Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), Senator John Ensign (R-Nev.), Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), and Senator Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) introduced the bill earlier this year. "The biggest piece of legislation in Congress this year, because it goes right to the heart of how we keep our high standard of living," said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), who managed the bill on the Senate floor.

The legislation draws on the recommendations proposed in the National Academy of Sciences “Rising Above the Gathering Storm” report and the Council on Competitiveness’ “Innovate America” report, which found a decline in U.S. student interest and performance in the fields of science, technology, mathematics, and engineering that could threaten the nation’s economic competitiveness.

More specifically, the America COMPETES Act would:
Increase Research Investment by:
• Doubling funding for the National Science Foundation (NSF) from approximately $5.6 billion in Fiscal Year 2006 to $11.2 billion in Fiscal Year 2011.
• Setting the Department of Energy’s Office of Science on track to double in funding over ten years, increasing from $3.6 billion in Fiscal Year 2006 to over $5.2 billion in Fiscal Year 2011.
• Establishing the Innovation Acceleration Research Program to direct federal agencies funding research in science and technology to set as a goal dedicating approximately 8% of their Research and Development (R&D) budgets toward high-risk frontier research.
• Authorizing the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) from approximately $703 million in Fiscal Year 2008 to approximately $937 million in Fiscal Year 2011 and requiring NIST to set aside no less than 8 percent of its annual funding for high-risk, high-reward innovation acceleration research.
• Directing NASA to increase funding for basic research and fully participate in interagency activities to foster competitiveness and innovation, using the full extent of existing budget authority.
• Coordinating ocean and atmospheric research and education at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other agencies to promote U.S. leadership in these important fields.
Strengthen Educational Opportunities in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Critical Foreign Languages by:

• Authorizing competitive grants to States to promote better alignment of elementary and secondary education with the knowledge and skills needed for success in postsecondary education, the 21st century workforce, and the Armed Forces, and grants to support the establishment or improvement of statewide P-16 education longitudinal data systems.
• Strengthening the skills of thousands of math and science teachers by establishing training and education programs at summer institutes hosted at the National Laboratories and by increasing support for the Teacher Institutes for the 21st Century program at NSF.
• Expanding the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program at NSF to recruit and train individuals to become math and science teachers in high- need local educational agencies.
• Assisting States in establishing or expanding statewide specialty schools in math and science that students from across the state would be eligible to attend and providing expert assistance in teaching from National Laboratories’ staff at those schools.
• Facilitating the expansion of Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) programs by increasing the number of teachers prepared to teach AP/IB and pre-AP/IB math, science, and foreign language courses in high need schools, thereby increasing the number of courses available and students who take and pass AP and IB exams.
• Developing and implementing programs for bachelor’s degrees in math, science, engineering, and critical foreign languages with concurrent teaching credentials and part-time master’s in education programs for math, science, and critical foreign language teachers to enhance both content knowledge and teaching skills.
• Creating partnerships between National Laboratories and local high-need high schools to establish centers of excellence in math and science education.
• Expanding existing NSF graduate research fellowship and traineeship programs, requiring NSF to work with institutions of higher education to facilitate the development of professional science master’s degree programs, and expanding NSF’s science, mathematics, engineering and technology talent program.
• Providing Math Now grants to improve math instruction in the elementary and middle grades and provide targeted help to struggling students so that all students can master grade-level mathematics standards.
• Expanding programs to increase the number of students from elementary school through postsecondary education who study critical foreign languages and become proficient.
Develop an Innovation Infrastructure by:
• Establishing a President’s Council on Innovation and Competitiveness to develop a comprehensive agenda to promote innovation and competitiveness in the public and private sectors.
• Requiring the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a study to identify forms of risk that create barriers to innovation.

“Innovation is the driver of future prosperity and quality of life. Congress is getting it and getting around to it. Much more work is ahead to shape the policy architecture of the 21^st century innovation ecosystem.” said Egils Milbergs, president of the Center for Accelerating Innovation, commenting on the bi-partisan passage of the America Competes Act (S.761).

DOWNLOAD summary here:

Download s. 761 America COMPETES Act SUMMARY.pdf

Digital Strategies for the Global Innovation Economy

Egils Milbergs, president, Center for Accelerating Innovation, gave a keynote presentation April 17, 2007 at the Microsoft Innovation Technology Center in conjunction with the Swedish-American Entrepreneurial Days in Chicago. He addressed a group of US and Swedish business executives on the current health and future prospects of national innovation systems with a particular focus on how digital technologies are contributing to higher productivity growth. The presentation examined global competitiveness trends, highlighted differences in the Swedish and US innovation system, and proposed the development of a digital innovation ecosystem to accelerate business and technology clusters in both Sweden and the US. Link to presentation slides: Download EgilsMilbergsGlobalInnovationEconomy4-17-07FINAL.pdf

Milbergs said, "Innovation will be the key driver of economic growth and standard in living in the 21^st Century. However, our new understanding of innovation rejects the idea that innovation simply flows automatically from some earlier process of discovery and invention and in a linear way proceeds to the marketplace. In fact, the innovation process is increasingly non-linear, networked and more globally interactive. It is a new kind of innovation ecosystem.”

Unlike previous cycles of disruptive innovation based on tangible assets and manual labor (e.g. natural resources, steam, railways, heavy engineering, oil, automobile, manufacturing, mass production) we now need to focus on innovating intangible assets such as knowledge, communication, organizational learning, creativity, intellectual property, networks and human relationships. In this context advanced industrial economies cannot just rely on cost minimization, quality, off shoring and productivity improvement. Innovation success requires more investment in international relationships and intangible assets to achieve a competitive edge.

Information and Communication Technology, ICT, is one of Sweden's dominant industry sectors. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) recently named Sweden as one of the leading countries in the Internet and other IT markets. Sweden's specialties include development of wireless communication and technology, vehicular telematics, business application software, photonics and broadband communications technology, Internet software, mobile applications and services, industrial IT, and applied IT in a number of industries. Sweden is the 3rd most competitive economy, according to the Global Competitiveness Report 2006-2007 by the World Economic Forum. 48 of Europe's fastest-growing technology companies are Swedish, according to Deloitte's Technology European Fast 500 ranking 2005.