Council on Competitiveness Lays Out National Innovation Initiative

A December gathering of leaders from many of the nation's largest companies raised what could be considered a battle cry for the U.S. to take more seriously the implications of globalization.

While most of the corporate giants at the Council on Competitiveness event held last month are actively positioning their companies in the global economy - by offshoring manufacturing and back office operations, scaling up international sales divisions, and increasing R&D investments overseas - their unified alarm call was the U.S. as an economic power is seriously threatened without a more proactive and aggressive national strategy to encourage innovation.

To help the nation's decision makers chart that corrected course, the Council unveiled a 68-page plan outlining numerous recommendations to be implemented for a National Innovation Initiative (NII). Innovate America: Thriving in a World of Challenge and Change draws on input received over the past 15 months from more than 400 leaders and scholars from universities and colleges, corporations, professional societies, industry associations and government agencies.

Recommendations are proposed in three key categories:

• Investment:  Stimulate radical innovation by reallocating 3 percent of all federal agency R&D budgets toward "Innovation Acceleration" grants that invest in novel, high-risk and exploratory research; energize the entrepreneurial economy by establishing 10 Innovation Hot Spots at regional locations across the U.S. over the next five years; reduce the cost of tort litigation from 2 percent to 1 percent of GDP; create safe-harbor provisions to promote voluntary disclosure of intangible assets while aligning private-sector compensations and incentives to reward long-term value creation; and boost seed capital to energize the entrepreneurial economy.
• Infrastructure:  Develop new metrics to understand innovation performance and aggregate into a biannual national innovation scorecard; build quality into all phases of the patent process; transform the patent database into a searchable tool to mine the landscape of ideas; strengthen America's manufacturing capacity by establishing advanced centers for production excellence, including shared facilities and consortia that incorporate standards for best practices; and build a 21st century network infrastructure with healthcare as the test bed.
• Talent:  Educate the next generation of innovators by pioneering an extensive portable graduate fellowship program to give control of educational choices back to students; align federal and state skills needs more closely with training resources while fostering stronger ties and partnerships between academic institutions, industry and government to serve regional interests; establish tax-advantaged lifelong learning accounts for employees to promote continuous learning and new skills; improve health and pension portability; offer tax credits for skill-based learning; and reform immigration policies to attract the best and the brightest S&E students and graduates.

The Council plans to hold several regional conferences over the next few months to help advance the NII strategy. Innovate America is available at: http://www.compete.org/pdf/NII_Final_Report.pdf