In the recent presidential campaign, neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney said anything meaningful about how to fix the U.S. innovation system. Both ran as status quo candidates who acted as though there was nothing to fix. Virtually no one who follows the issue agrees with this, but for the moment the political system remains oblivious.
About ten years ago, I began to hear murmurs from high-tech industry people that American innovation wasn't working as advertized. Some of this was disappointment tied to the dot-com bust, but most of it consisted of people looking ahead in their particular technology-based industry and not seeing much. I had a number of off-guard conversations at wedding receptions or post-conference airport cabs in which someone would say, "we don't really have a next big thing in the pipeline anymore." I heard this from a pharma scientist in 2002, then from a corporate computer engineer, and something similar from IT executives at different firms over the ensuing months. Official reports started coming out, such as "Rising Above the Gathering Storm" (2005), which warned that the U.S. was losing its innovation lead. At the time, however, most people assumed, like Romney and Obama this year, that the innovation system just needed a few tweaks and bigger inputs --- more funding for research, more science and engineering (STEM) graduates.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Christopher Newfield: Can Selective Immigration Help the Innovation Crisis?
