In the “Policy Forum” section of Science Magazine this week, it is argued that US policy needs to be changed to support innovation so that the US remains competitive. In making this argument, the author describes innovations at IBM, Cisco, and Li & Fung (a Chinese apparel manufacturer) that have changed the way global corporations operate: by freeing up the innovation process making it a complex, fluid network. Then he calls for changing US policy to promote innovation, presumably by increasing funding for innovation. Although the author doesn’t recommend specifics, I am guessing this is his solution based on the following excerpts:

The government continues to believe, wrongly, that market forces are sufficient to bridge the “valley of death” between basic research and commercial innovations without public policy support.

Government policy in the last decade has been marked by sustained complacency regarding the assets on which productivity growth must be based…The Administration has abolished its Technology Administration, which was the source of the department’s innovation policy research.

So the author sees that large bureaucracies in the corporate world stifle innovation, and that the successful global model reduces bureaucracy. (Although he doesn’t explicitly say this, the implication is the more bureaucratic structure can not respond quickly enough to consumer demands.) Then he wants government, which is inherently bureaucratic, to respond to this new model with new policy and funding.

Government is reactionary – as soon as a new public policy is in place, the corporate world will have innovated again (and presumably public policy experts will bemoan that the government needs to catch up with these innovations with more funding, yet again).

Another bizarre leap of logic concerns the need for the US to be competitive. He describes how other countries are catching up to or surpassing us in metrics such as the number of researchers, PhD’s in science and engineering, and how they rank for new R&D facilities. I read this as: we need to protect our science and technology industry, or we’ll lost in the global race. (This is, of course, nonsense – worldwide division of labor benefits all who participate.) Then, after calling for more government intervention, he writes:

The temptation to revert to protectionism must be resisted.

Ummm… US government intervention on behalf of US corporations is protectionism!