Scientists in the US remain the best funded in the world, but they say falling federal investment and cuts due to sequestration, coupled with the enormous resources other countries are lavishing on research, are creating an “innovation deficit”.
The consequence, say the presidents of more than 200 US universities, will be fewer US scientific and technological breakthroughs, fewer US patents and fewer US start-ups, products and jobs. Investment in research is not inconsistent with deficit reduction, indeed it is vital to it, they said in an open letter to President Barack Obama and members of Congress last summer.
The pressure researchers are coming under to justify federal funding was underlined last month in Chicago at one of their big annual conferences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The meeting, held every year since 1848, is intended to showcase the latest from the laboratory. This year however, the focus was not on research, but on innovation, entrepreneurship and the economy.
“I suspect that this may be the first AAAS meeting in which these three topics are so specifically highlighted,” said Phillip Sharp, AAAS president, Nobel laureate and biotechnology entrepreneur.
In the past, it was assumed that investment in research would inevitably yield innovation at some unspecified point in the future. To take a topical example, back in 1979 the US Department of Energy published a report called “Commercialisation plan for the recovery of gas from unconventional resources” and began to sponsor R&D in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for extracting shale-bound oil and gas reserves.
It took more than 30 years, but this research underpinned the exploitation of shale resources that previously were considered irrecoverable, prompting the current US oil and gas boom.
Now it is no longer sufficient to make a discovery and wait for others to commercialise it. Scientists in universities and public research institutes are being called on to take a greater role in translating their findings into new products and services.
What is needed, said Dr Sharp in his AAAS presidential address, is better integration of the discovery process with the entrepreneurial translation process, which turns discoveries into products and devices.
It is ironic that this soul-searching and loss of confidence in the great American innovation machine comes at a time when so many other countries are banking on research spending to expand their economies.
Alongside investing in R&D as an explicit part of economic development policy, these countries have looked at the US model as they have set out to create innovation systems capable of taking basic research through to the market.
China, for example, has tripled its R&D intensity since 1998, according to the OECD. The result, as Rongping Mu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences told the AAAS, has been to push China to second position in the number of scientific papers it publishes and to sixth in the number of citations to these papers.
At the same time as developing an excellent science base, China has put in place a policy framework to couple research and commercialisation and integrate all aspects of the innovation process.
The aim “is to build an innovation-driven country to promote economic development in a more efficient, fair and sustainable way,” said Dr Mu. “There were a lot of criticisms of China, saying China is a copier and so on. But in the past 10 years, there has been fundamental change.”
Similarly Kanetaka Maki of the University of California, San Diego, described how the Japanese government deliberately emulated the US system when it introduced a national innovation system in 1998. “A central pillar was the launch of the university technology transfer office,” said Dr Maki.
The South Korean government too, has put the focus on academic knowledge transfer as part of a new national agenda called The Creative Economy. The ambition is to replace “the catch-up paradigm”, said Jong-Guk Song of the Science and Technology Policy Institute in Seoul.
Universities are expected to lead this economic paradigm shift. “If they don’t collaborate with industry, they don’t get research funds from the government,” said Dr Song.
Until a decade ago, the size and quality of the US research establishment meant its scientists seldom faced international competition for new ideas. Now, large investments in the scientific fabric elsewhere in the world are shifting the balance of power.
At the same time, the US is witnessing “stagnation” in R&D funding, Dr Sharp said. While it will take some time to become evident, it will lead to a slowing of economic growth. In the face of this, “we have no choice but to become better at linking discovery, innovation and entrepreneurship,” he concluded.