Under Secretary for Technology Looks to the 21st Century
On December 10, the Commerce Department’s Under Secretary for Technology, Mary Good, spoke before an appreciative audience at a University of Maryland Physics Department colloquium. Speaking from a wealth of experience in all three sectors, Good addressed how government, industry and academia in the U.S. should prepare to meet the technological challenges of the next century. This country has “everything we need” to lead in the twenty-first century, she announced: “It is ours to lose.”
Good named four factors affecting the U.S.'s competitive position as we enter a new century: globalization of technology, capital and labor; tight budgets; a post-Cold War lessening of incentives for federal support of R&D; and the increasingly rapid pace of innovation. She pointed out that competition was arising from many developing countries whose GDP growth rates of up to 9.5 percent outpaced the 2-2.5 percent rate of the U.S., Japan, and European nations. Most of the fast-growing countries, she noted, have active policies for the acquisition of foreign technologies, and plans for increasing their R&D investment, fostering public-private partnerships, modernizing manufacturing, and developing information highways.
Good described an emerging consensus regarding actions the U.S. should take to maintain its competitive advantage. She cited four reports that provide similar recommendations: encouraging cooperation and collaboration across sectors to build on the strengths of each. Industry, she said, adapted most promptly to the new global realities by shortening time horizons and moving R&D from central laboratories to business units. She declared chances “very, very slim” that big corporate labs would return, and advised that industry would have to find other ways of obtaining basic research, such as cooperation with universities. She described examples where such partnerships were formed to compete for NIST Advanced Technology Program awards, and continued afterwards, to the benefit of both parties.
Government, Good urged, should incorporate technology policy into its mainstream economic policy-making. She pointed out that while plans to balance the federal budget would free up capital for investing, there was no guarantee that it would be invested in the U.S. Although there is bipartisan support for making the business climate attractive to global investors, Good said no consensus exists on how to do so. One suggestion she made was to improve support for suppliers (as the NIST Manufacturing Extension Partnerships were designed to do); even the lowest-tier suppliers must be globally competitive, she explained, or companies would purchase parts elsewhere.
To her academic audience, Good recommended a reinvigorated emphasis on teaching, more university-industry collaborations, and broader preparation of students for jobs in other sectors. “If I could change one thing,” she declared, it would be “the attitude of faculty” toward non-academic jobs. Asked whether universities were producing too many technically-trained graduates, her response was, it would be “a disaster if [you] believe that.” For the 50 percent of graduate students who are foreign, she saw more opportunities becoming available in their home countries. In addition, she said much potential exists within small start-up companies, but current university career mechanisms do not look at small companies. She encouraged graduate students to spend summers working in such firms to become familiar with the opportunities available. She agreed that the government’s “procurement attitude” toward university research was partly to blame for making researchers unwilling to part with grad students, and forcing them to compete against each other for funds.
While Good encouraged the academic community to better communicate its unique role to Congress, she argued strongly against speaking up only for basic research. She urged researchers to support the whole R&D portfolio, warning that it would be “deadly poison” if universities became seen as “just another interest group” lobbying for their own funding. She reminded her audience that some in Congress simply partitioned research into basic and applied based on where it was funded. In her experience, many Members only classify research supported by NIH, NSF, and the Energy Department’s Basic Energy Sciences as basic. Notably, she emphasized that this classification omitted High Energy and Nuclear Physics, among many other areas. Good reiterated the importance of supporting the entire, balanced R&D portfolio across all disciplines, commenting that if it were not for advances in physics and chemistry, molecular biologists “would still be out counting bugs.”
The four reports on R&D policy that Good cited are available as follows:
The two Clinton Administration reports, “Science in the National Interest” (released in August 1994; see FYIs #120-122, 1994) and “Technology in the National Interest” (released this fall; see FYI #158, 1996) are both available on the World Wide Web. For “Science in the National Interest,” go to: http://www2.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/OSTP/html/OSTP_doc_index.html and for “Technology in the National Interest,” go to: http://www2.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/OSTP/NSTC/html/NSTC_Home.html
“Endless Frontier, Limited Resources,” (April 1996; see FYI #74, 1996) by the Council on Competitiveness, is available under “Major Policy Reports” on their Web page at http://nii.nist.gov/coc/coc_pubs.html ; or can be ordered, at $25.00 plus shipping, from the CoC Publications Office, 202-682-4292.
“Global Innovation/National Competitiveness” (September 1996) is by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ordering instructions for the report (ISBN 0-89206-289-4), priced at $19.95 plus shipping, are available from Heidi Shinn at 202-775-3119 or http://www.csis.org/html/pubs.html ; look on the Web page under “New Publications” for a summary. This report will be reviewed in an upcoming FYI.
