Newswise — The current U.S. innovation model has in multiple respects fallen short in the face of today’s technology competition challenges, including from the state-sponsored technology strategy China is employing in support of its geopolitical objectives. In a new report, MITRE experts outline a framework for federal investment in science and technology.
The report calls for:
- A national-level effort between government, industry, and academia to address the most critical S&T priorities.
- Interdisciplinary research in basic and applied research.
- A focus on Advanced Manufacturing, Artificial Intelligence, biotechnology, climate and energy, cybersecurity, health informatics, microelectronics, Quantum Information Science, and telecommunications.
"What is needed is a new federal effort to build innovation-fostering partnerships: a voluntary coordination of government, industry, and academic activities to holistically address our nation’s most-critical S&T priorities," the authors write. "It must integrate such diverse players into a collaborative network to share information about opportunities and solutions, and to coordinate shared, complementary efforts across sectors, institutions, and disciplines in order to help catalyze solutions to the biggest technology-related challenges our society faces."
A new federal agenda for promoting S&T innovation must address itself to these market failures. To do this effectively, what's needed is a national-level effort: a synergy between government, industry, and academic activities to holistically address our nation’s most critical S&T priorities—while safeguarding the intellectual property, privacy rights, and autonomy of all participants and stakeholders. This new partnership will need to prioritize and steer federal R&D funding to overcome weaknesses in the current innovation model and to bring the requisite integrative, “system-of-systems thinking” to bear on relevant “technosystem” challenges in prioritized areas.
This report offers an intellectual framework to help shape such a federal S&T approach and suggests organizational forms from which to learn in establishing effective public-private cooperation to enable the U.S. innovation community to find a collaborative, voluntary way forward together in implementing a national “horizon strategy” to remedy market failures in today’s innovation economy and take advantage of technological opportunities in tomorrow’s. It also explains why certain key technology areas—advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate and energy, cybersecurity, health informatics, microelectronics, quantum information science, and telecommunications—would likely particularly reward federal attention as part of the Biden Administration’s new agenda, and it offers suggestions as to several additional points for prioritization in technology governance.
The full report can be found here.
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