What emphasis will incoming President Obama give to America's role in leading innovation? This was the theme of a day-long symposium called Supporting Innovation in an Economic Crisis held on December 1st at the University of California Washington Center. Sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Breakthrough Institute, University of California Washington Center, and Ford Foundation, it featured a dozen speakers with much information and a variety of perspectives.
A centerpiece was research by Fred Block and Michael Heller (Where do Innovations Come From: Transformations in the U.S. National Innovation System, 1970-2006) that found that a surprising majority (77 out of 88) award-winning technological innovations had received federal funding. The audience, which I'd guess numbered almost 200, was very interested in the significant, but not well known, role of government in funding technological innovation, and listened to speakers who urged the incoming Obama administration to pay attention to this area. Dr. Block used the term "stim-novation" to suggest that promoting innovation should be part of economic stimulus efforts. Other speakers discussed the importance of addressing energy policy priorities (they said "energy policy" overrides "climate change" as the key issue) by promoting innovation.
While this program did not directly address innovation@cfed's focus on expanding economic opportunity, it provided much food for thought about urgency felt in so many diverse quarters for promoting, accelerating and investing in innovation. There is much to learn about how best to do this, but there is great consensus that active and free-ranging exchange and sharing - connections - are essential. Forces that impede idea exchange and connections will be detrimental to innovation. Speakers mentioned the pressure on universities and their faculties to capitalize on commercializable discoveries may in some ways be serving to squelch the free exchange which actually leads to breakthroughs. Also, failure to find the resources to invest in all stages of the innovation process, from the very beginning, through pilot-testing and scale-up, and all the iterations along the way (picturesquely called, "the valley of death") will also spell doom for innovation.
What can we learn from this? How can we connect our world of social and economic innovation to the world of technological and business innovation, to our mutual benefit?
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