Renewing the Nation’s Innovation Ecosystem

University and Lab Technology Transfer, Entrepreneurship and Venture, Scale Up Challenges for New Technologies

The innovation ecosystem concept highlights the multiple intersecting and layered networks of cooperation underpinning the nation’s innovation and manufacturing activities.   However, there is a growing concern that key parts of this ecosystem are under stress, hampering the development and manufacturing of innovative technologies within the United States. 

Renewing this ecosystem is essential to encourage the scale up of innovative products across small and large companies. U.S. competitors sustain this middle space in their innovation and manufacturing systems in different ways. Corporate conglomerates in Japan and Korea have long played a central role in allocating resources to new products without the need for immediate returns.  Today, large state-owned enterprises in China address the technology scale-up challenge aided by their manufacturing expertise and the acquisition of foreign technologies. Importantly, Chinese firms are often supported by their ability to draw on substantial infusions of public resources and benefit from de facto protection in the domestic market. In Taiwan, ITRI has had a particularly distinguished record in launching new innovative businesses A singular success of this model is TSMC which has transformed the semiconductor industry. In Germany, the Fraunhofer institutes and research centers—which also receive extensive public funding—serve to bridge the space between the research base and industrial application often with particular attention to the needs of SMEs. This mezzanine infrastructure of applied research and the financial support for scale-up to manufacture is often missing or inadequate in the United States.

In this context, the focus of university and laboratory technology transfer must broaden from pushing ideas out of the lab to growing the capacity of the nation’s regions to capitalize on this research and develop the clusters to successfully produce next generation products here in the U.S.  Growing and connecting a network of locally focused innovation ecosystems is especially important in an age when ideas that emerge from U.S. laboratories and universities are often developed and commercialized overseas—to the advantage of our competitors and rivals. 


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Innovation Lightbulb: Strengthening K-12 STEM Education for a Robust U.S. Technology Workforce

According to the National Science Foundation, the average mathematics test scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress declined in 2022 compared to previous years. Improving math competency and fostering interest in STEM must start early in a child’s education and must reach across all communities. Doing so will help broaden and diversify the talent pipeline into industries of strategic and economic importance, ensuring U.S. competitiveness for years to come.

Newsletter by Julia Yoon — June 28, 2024

Securing IP and the Future of Pandemic Preparedness

By undermining intellectual property (IP) protections, the draft WHO Pandemic Agreement has the potential to harm the market-based ecosystem for biopharmaceutical innovation that is needed to make the world ready for the next pandemic.

Blog Post by Jeffrey Depp — May 28, 2024

Innovation Lightbulb: Breaking Down Private Sector Research and Development

Across three key metrics of innovative activity—total R&D expenditure, domestic R&D employment, and R&D intensity—four industrial subsectors stand out. This week, we dive into private-sector R&D activity and look at which industries are driving a surge in U.S. R&D activity.

Newsletter by Gregory Arcuri and Julia Yoon — May 22, 2024

Innovation Lightbulb: Foreign-born Share of the U.S. STEM Workforce

Among the U.S.’s most educated STEM workforce cohort, foreign-born representation is significant. Nearly 60 percent of doctorate-level computer and mathematical scientists and doctorate-level engineers employed across all S&E fields in the U.S. are foreign-born.

Newsletter by Julia Yoon — April 5, 2024