The Innovation Imperative

By Chad Evans — Much has changed in the innovation landscape over the last decade. Models of innovation continue to evolve, and the environment for American innovation presents new challenges — but also new opportunities.

In the early 2000s the open innovation movement emerged in response to the transformation of the global industrial landscape that began in the 1980’s. Vertically integrated corporations shed business units (particularly manufacturing) to focus on other competencies, and shifted research and development (R&D) away from basic research and towards the near-term needs of their respective business units. This ushered in an era in which foundational, technological breakthroughs were more likely to come from universities, national laboratories, and small start-up companies. Thus, businesses today increasingly look as much externally as internally for sources of invention and innovation.

In addition to the ever more outward focus of private sector innovators, the Great Recession of the late 2000s has created new pressures both on academia and legislators. The expectation that universities and community colleges will be active centers for economic development has heightened, and public expenditures on R&D are increasingly justifiable only if they directly boost the economy and create jobs in the near term.

As such, the last decade has witnessed the creation by innovation stakeholders of quasi-public institutions to bridge gaps in the innovation ecosystem — be they financial, institutional, or behavioral — widened by the open innovation movement, as well as by the decreasing federal investment in long-term R&D.

These public-private partnerships (PPPs) are designed to convene and enable diverse and multidisciplinary professional and social networks to engage in coordinated problem solving with the goal of translating into economic and social prosperity. Global leadership in science, technology, and innovation (STI) will accrue to the nations that perfect these translational institutions. However, recent, trailblazing Council on Competitiveness research exploring over 30 domestic and international PPPs and more than 180 related books, journal articles, and white papers (see: The Power of Partnerships), suggests these bridging institutions differ widely in their effectiveness. An important challenge facing the nation is to better understand and scale nationally these new, dynamic, complex, and difficult to observe models of innovation.

Bridging institutions, however, are firmly rooted in Vannevar Bush’s 20th Century vision of the U.S. science, technology, and innovation enterprise. While this model remains the global standard for national systems of innovation, transformational models rooted in the democratization and self-organization of innovation are beginning to emerge across the nation. Enabled by the plummeting cost of synthesizing and decoding DNA, the development of relatively inexpensive tools such as centrifuges, and crowdfunding platforms, doctoral students, for example, are dropping out of big-budget academic institutions and corporate R&D departments to build their own labs. Manufacturing innovation is following a similar path (i.e. maker spaces) — a path that is now well worn by the information and communication technology (ICT) community and its “hobbyists” that launched the personal computing revolution in garages across America. It is, in fact, ICT — specifically the ever cheaper, more powerful, and cloud-enabled computing tools — that underpins the revolutionary changes in fields such as biotechnology and manufacturing. On the surface what is emerging are 3-D printers, inexpensive reactors, and microfinance websites.

What is less obvious is a fundamental change in how people think about and pursue innovation. It is now possible for someone to imagine, develop, and scale a disruptive technology independent of traditional institutions of innovation. The linkage between production and capital has been severed. Innovation in one field, sector, or discipline increases the pace of innovation in another. The stage is now set for exponential innovation, and we must optimize our nation for this new, unfolding reality.

The broader structural factors upon which innovation depends have also changed since the last decade. Any assessment of current or future models of innovation must acknowledge that innovation does not occur in isolation. The talent pipeline must be considered with its shifting demographics and bifurcation of the workforce into highly skilled and sought after groups and those with potentially obsolete skill sets; early evidence has revealed the precipitous loss of U.S. manufacturing in the last decade has eliminated a critical information feedback loop that is hindering American innovation; the convergence of once disparate domains such as energy, food, and water is making innovation more complex every day; new tools including Big Data and high performance computing-enabled modeling and simulation are being applied to product development processes to reduce speed to market; and the rise of global clusters of excellence and aggressive industrial policy in countries such as China — now the largest economy in the world — also impact the optimization of the U.S. innovation ecosystem.

The Council on Competitiveness has been addressing all of these shifts and transformations over the past two years in an unprecedented partnership with the National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate of Engineering, Office of Emerging Frontiers of Research and Innovation (EFRI). This effort — the “Exploring Innovation Frontiers Initiative” (EIFI) — is:

• Crafting with national and regional stakeholders a transformational innovation action agenda that draws on the strengths of NSF research and positions the United States as a global innovation leader for decades to come;

• Catalyzing a larger movement to enhance U.S. competitiveness and economic growth by accelerating knowledge creation and the transfer of science and engineering research into market reality; and

• Expanding and improving public and private sector engagement with NSF (and other critical agencies and departments) by highlighting for potential partners around the country how and where NSF and others engage in the innovation process.

Chad Evans serves as Executive Vice President of the Council on Competitiveness and Treasurer of the GFCC. As Council EVP overseeing all programs and initiatives, Chad develops and manages the Council’s complete policy agenda and workstream, including: creating the Exploring Innovation Frontiers Initiative with the National Science Foundation and the American Energy & Manufacturing Competitiveness Partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy; helping to launch the National Engineering Forum to elevate attention to the roles engineers and the engineering enterprise play in driving long-term prosperity; building and shepherding the Council’s Technology Leadership and Strategy Initiative (TLSI), engaging more than 50 Fortune 500 chief technology officers; and helming CEO-level innovation dialogues with key global partners across Latin America, Europe and Asia.

In particular, Chad has developed and executed a series of global innovation summits: with the EU and Japan in 2005, and more deeply with Brazil over the past decade. In addition to leading the development to date of 3US-Brazil Innovation Summits, Chad has co-created 15 US-Brazil Innovation Learning Labs and manages the US-Brazil Bi-National Innovation Platform. He has also co-chaired the President Obama and President Roussef U.S.-Brazil Innovation Working Group. Chad holds an MS from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, an Honors concentration in International Business Diplomacy from Georgetown’s Landegger Program, and a BA in International Affairs from Emory University. He is a member of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station Advisory Board; an ARCS Foundation National Science and Engineering Advisory Council member; a US German Marshall Fund Fellow; treasurer for the Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils; a member of the Board of the India Council on Competitiveness; a steering committee member of the South Big Data Hub; and a past member of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Industry Advisory Council and World Economic Forum Advisory Board on Russian Competitiveness.