A new non-partisan report (PDF) from the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) finds that in the last decade, the country has trended in the wrong innovation direction. The New York Times report on the report is here.
While pointing out that other recent studies have come to different conclusions about the state of innovation in the United States, the ITIF study is compared to another well known, and well received, study, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," which concluded that the world was catching up to the United States in the realm of science and technology, the foundation for innovative activity in modern economies.
Moreover, other governments are not standing pat.Some countries, including Singapore, Taiwan, Finland and China, are pursuing policies that are explicitly designed to spur innovation. These policies typically try to nurture a broader “ecology of innovation,” which often includes education, training, intellectual property protection and immigration. This is in contrast to the industrial policy of the 1980s in which governments helped pick winners among domestic industries.The foundation study, according to John Kao, a former professor at the Harvard business school and an innovation consultant to governments and corporations, is an ambitious effort at measurement. He called its conclusions “a wake-up call.”








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