Towards the Department of Commerce and Innovation: The 2022-2026 Strategic Plan

The continued rapid pace of technological change, the rise of advanced research, innovation, and manufacturing capabilities around the world, and increasing geopolitical instability have led to growing calls for the United States to develop a strategic plan to maintain its global competitiveness and economic growth and assure its national security.

Writing in the journal Nature, Harold Varmus and Elias Zerhouni, former directors of the National Institutes of Health, observe that governments in nearly all highly developed economies have set out strategic goals to coordinate long-term activities across sectors. China’s Made in China 2025 plan, notably, directs investments in major technologies such as semiconductors, biotechnology, and supercomputing. The European Union’s U.S. $108 billion Horizon Europe research program for 2021-2027 seeks to improve industrial competitiveness in a variety of emerging technologies.

Varmus and Zerhouni point out that “Unlike most other advanced economies, the United States has typically relied on a diversity of decentralized federal science agencies to design and conduct the government’s research programmes.” The absence of a strategy, they note, limits America’s ability to compete and collaborate with other nations.

It is therefore significant that the Department of Commerce recently released its own Strategic Plan for 2022-2026. Commerce is home to a variety of agencies that play critical roles in promoting research, innovation, trade, and regional growth, including the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the International Trade Commission, and the Economic Development Administration. Below we summarize the five key takeaways from the Strategic Plan.

5 Key Focuses of the Strategic Plan: 

1. Reinforce Supply Chains: Commerce plans to advance U.S. leadership in semiconductors through its stewardship of the expected CHIPS Act, increase resilience and diversity in critical supply chains, and accelerate technology and deployment for manufacturing. Along with this, the Department aims to advance entrepreneurship and high-growth small and medium-sized enterprises that rely on these supply chains to be successful.
2. Support research on emerging technologies: Recognizing the need for U.S. firms to rapidly develop, commercialize, and deploy emerging technologies in a globally competitive environment, the Commerce strategy calls for enhancing U.S. entrepreneurship by supporting research and development related to emerging technologies and by strengthening U.S. participation in technical standards development.
3. Foster international cooperation: Commerce aims to engage with allies and partners to broaden export access for small and medium businesses, assist U.S. exporters seeking foreign government contracts, address foreign policies that bar exports of U.S. goods and services, and attract foreign direct investment into the U.S. On the other hand, Commerce strategy also calls for administering and enforcing exports controls and foreign investment restrictions, enforcing U.S. antidumping and countervailing duty trade remedy laws, and identifying and protecting emerging technologies essential to national security.
4. Protect intellectual property: Commerce’s strategy calls for accessible, strong, and effective intellectual property (IP) rights to advance innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurship as a critical point throughout their plan. The strategy calls on the Patent and Trademark Office to increase its efforts to ensure equitable and affordable access to IP protection, enhance patent quality and compact protection, reduce trademark pendency, and protect and enforce IP abroad.
5. Encourage inclusive innovation: Encouraging greater diversity in the technology workforce, the Commerce strategy calls for building sustainable, employer-driven career pathways to meet employers’ need for talent and to connect Americans to quality jobs. Additionally, Commerce looks to improve the usability of Commerce data and to advance ethical, responsible, and equitable data practices, while modernizing economic and demographic statistics to better meet business, policymaker, and community needs.

Overall, the Strategic Plan draws together the agency’s existing mandates in research and development, manufacturing, standards and intellectual property protection, workforce and regional economic development, and trade in terms of an overall strategy. Together, they represent the new mission of what might be termed the “Department of Commerce and Innovation.”
 

Gabrielle Athanasia is a Program Coordinator and Research Assistant with the Renewing American Innovation Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.

Jillian Cota is an intern with with the Renewing American Innovation Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.

The Perspectives on Innovation Blog is produced by the Renewing American Innovation Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).