Conclusion

Our National Innovation Framework boasts three core components: a National Public Private Partnership Innovation Program that sits astride a National Innovation Seed Fund and Federal Innovation Partnership Program, and collaborates with a new National Innovation Advisor. Together, the leaders of these components would deliver a central focus and create an optimized and integrated national network of many players that is essential to a national innovation strategy. We believe this structure is the best way not just to implement as well as enact a national innovation strategy. 

The United States does not need a top-down innovation strategy that resembles government-led industrial policy, nor would such a proposal survive long in Congress or the halls of the Obama administration. Similarly, the United States simply cannot continue to run the current overlapping but uncoordinated sets of innovation programs that are failing to deliver the common national strategy our country needs to compete successfully in the 21st-century global innovation economy.

Instead, our country needs an innovation program that leverages the best talent from the public and private sector. It is the best policy solution. And it’s the best political solution on Capitol Hill. For this reason, we believe a national public-private partnership innovation program is what Congress and the Obama administration should pursue immediately due to our current window of opportunity and the risk of losing ground to competing nations daily.