Sustaining the innovation agenda
04/01/2007
Despite the compelling agendas put forth in the current adminsitration’s American Competitiveness Initiative, as well as in the National Academies’ Rising Above the Gathering Storm report and the Council on Competitiveness’s Innovate America report, Congress adjourned last year without passing the widely acclaimed National Competitiveness Investment Act of 2006 (NCIA). Among its many provisions for enhancing US competitiveness through innovation, the NCIA would have doubled the NSF budget from $5.6 billion to $11.2 billion over the next five years.
The good news is that a Continuing Appropriations Resolution was passed in February that covers government spending for fiscal year 2007 and includes, for example, an increase of more than $330 million for NSF funding beyond 2006 levels. Because the package to increase research funding was among only a handful of programs to receive budget increases, the move sends a strong signal of support for the concept that innovation is, indeed, the key to nation’s competitiveness. “There’s a certain voltage behind the innovation agenda right now,” says Alan Hurd, director of the Materials Research Society and a leading advocate of increasing federal funding for basic research.
The bad news, however, is that the recent increases are approved only for the rest of the year. And, as Hurd contends, the physical science community is at risk of losing traction, as it has in the past, after a year or two of budget upticks, especially as defending the budget is likely to be difficult every year for the foreseeable future. To avoid that, he stresses, it will be critical for researchers to keep the pressure on.
Indeed, the US desperately needs to reverse a decades-long trend of reduced federal funding for science, which, sadly, has occurred at the same time the nation’s economic competitiveness has relied on the kind of innovation that only basic research can bring. In fact, since the IT revolution of the 1990s, the US has depended on disruptive technologies to drive growth. This approach was a radical departure from the corporate-based economic model that had been in place since WWII. Back then, corporations’ research labs focused on productivity improvements, not on radical technologies that would disrupt their economic models.
Unfortunately, science funding priorities failed to change with the times. Over the past several decades, the US has spent progressively less on the basic research that leads to revolutionary technologies and increasingly more on corporate development aimed at evolutionary gains. In fact, 40 years ago, federally funded basic research was responsible for nearly 70% of total US R&D expenditures, while corporate-funded development totaled 30%, notes William Bonvillian, director of MIT’s Washington Office and a spokesperson for federally funded university research. But now those figures have reversed, as industry accounts for two-thirds of total R&D spending.
Moreover, the gap has been widening. During the same 40-year period, federal investment in basic research, measured as a share of total GDP, has fallen from 2% to 0.5%. Conversely, corporate development spending grew 2% annually between 1994 and 2000, and is still rising at about 0.3% per year. “In an innovation-based economy, this is not what you want,” warns Bonvillian. “The curves are going in the wrong direction.”
The problem for the US has been compounded by increased global competition for technological innovation. Currently, the US accounts for 34% of world R&D, which includes both federal and corporate spending. But both China and India are on track to continue increasing their basic research budgets by 10% annually and to surpass the US by the end of the decade.
The recent spending increase for basic research is clearly a step in the right direction. But the solution to sustaining momentum over the long term will be to engage and equip technologists to become more effective advocates of the benefits of basic research. As Bonvillian asserts, we need to build new business and public-policy courses into technical education programs to give scientists and engineers the tools they will need to better understand the political forces from which they will increasingly need support.
It will also be essential in the near term for US scientists and engineers to play a more active role on Capital Hill. Grassroots efforts are particularly effective, especially when researchers can demonstrate to government representatives that new technologies can provide solutions to pressing problems as well as create jobs and economic growth, notes Hurd. Given the confluence of so many factors-the globalization of science, the National Academy reports on competitiveness, the bipartisan political support-means that this is a once-in-a-career opportunity that we in the physical sciences just can’t afford to fumble.
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Phil LoPiccolo
Editor-in-Chief