Technology Innovation Can Improve Our Government and Our Economy

By Jim Turner and Maryann Feldman
We are living through a major revolution brought about by Moore’s Law, the digitization of data, the Internet, and a plethora of productivity-enhancing software. Organizational and geographical boundaries are blurring as corporations reinvent themselves on national and international scales. These changes are not value neutral. They are both productive and destructive. And they are causing massive reallocations of jobs and wealth worldwide—as well as collateral environmental and social damage.

No matter if you believe that the world is flat or spiky, it is simply true that the world order is changing. This is occurring at a time when the U.S. government is diminished due to almost three decades of distrust, downsizing, and outsourcing. Democracy suffers when government becomes an object of ridicule rather than a vehicle for collective action. Democracy thrives when government delivers for the common good.

Globally, other governments that are attuned to the changing world order are working to build competitive advantage, advancing all aspects of their societies to boost the economic prosperity of their citizens. While we debate the merits of innovation policy, they invest heavily in government labs on applied research of importance to their industries, co-locating with research universities and industrial parks to work on focused technologies. While Congress each year debates whether to extend the research and development tax credit, other countries provide generous and lengthy tax holidays and greatly subsidized manufacturing facilities to attract companies from around the world.

Unfortunately, these same governments have sometimes looked the other way as air and water quality decline. And they have been less than rigorous in health and labor inspections and quality control—sometimes alarmingly lax. These governments contend that they will catch up on these problems once they have lifted the prosperity of their citizens sufficiently, but in the meantime their industries threaten our planet’s health. At the same time, they are all aggressively climbing the high-tech ladder, claiming more and more competitive 21^st century industries as their own.

In contrast, our country is not competing as aggressively. Certainly, there is no need to enumerate the problems here that have been laid out eloquently in Rising Above the Gathering Storm by the National Academies, in Innovate America by the Council on Competitiveness and in numerous other studies, including A National Innovation Agenda, by two advisory board members of Science Progress. Yet there are a host of questions these reports cannot answer.

The reason: We as a nation badly need to update our view to include the role of government in science and technology in the radically new environment of 21^st century communications technologies, and to debate new ways of working together on open innovation. With this first posting, we start that conversation on what must be done if we are to retain our position among the most innovative and productive countries in the world.

We and others on Science Progress seek a dialog on the following overarching questions:

• How can the United States, its regions, and its localities turn the communications and computer revolution to their advantage?

• What is the role of government in assuring the competitiveness of industries, companies and individual work? Is it possible that to develop “lean government,” characterized by just-in-time, unobtrusive supplier of services to industry, that still protects the public interest?

• Is there a new Federalism? How is the relationship among federal, state and local government changing?

• Can goods be manufactured in America? How must our policies change to stop further decline? What is the role of human capital in a manufacturing renaissance?

The devil is also in the details. We also seek the best available ideas on the more detailed science and technology policies that will be at heart of any new, effective national policies to foster broad economic prosperity. Among these questions:

• As Federal, State and Local governments digitize, what are the benefits and what are the risks of mining that data for public health and safety or for competitive purposes?

• Given that the United States is the only major country to develop its technical standards in a distributive, inclusive fashion, does that give us any advantages in this new era?

• Without government incentives and coordination, are we in danger of becoming a “gadget economy,” where innovation is focused on incremental improvements while larger concerns are unaddressed?

• Is it too late to establish level playing fields through standards or international agreements regarding environment, labor, and other quality of life issues related to companies and the workforce?

• Does the distributive nature of work in an Internet era increase the importance of state and local government?

• At the Federal level, how can the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the White House and quality standards be used to allow the government to function in a real-time, lean manner?

• What changes must occur at universities for them to be real-time suppliers of knowledge and solutions to industry?

• What trade offs would this require and under what circumstances should universities make the changes?

• What is the responsibility of companies to local communities in constructing competitive advantage?

Over the course of this year, at Science Progress, we and others will begin to develop detailed answers to these questions, in prelude to the arrival of a new President and a new Congress in Washington and to the election of new state and local officials around the country. This is a debate we as a people need to have about our government and our future. We and others at Science Progress plan to put forward our best ideas on these topics. We hope you will join us.

Jim Turner is Chief Counsel, Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives and serves on the Board of Directors for Scientists and Engineers for America. Maryann Feldman is the Miller Distinguished Professor of Higher Education at the University of Georgia. Both are writing as individuals and not in their official capacities.

This story was originally published on Science Progress