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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Rescheduled: A Conversation with Rep. Kevin Kiley on U.S. Intellectual Property Leadership
Event — December 12, 2023
Enhancing the Regional Impact of the CHIPS and Science Act
Event — May 3, 2023
Enhancing the Regional Impact of the CHIPS and Science Act - Keynote Addresses
Transcript — May 3, 2023
Enhancing the Regional Impact of the CHIPS and Science Act - Lunch Remarks
Transcript — May 3, 2023
Enhancing the Regional Impact of the CHIPS and Science Act - Building Regional Research Ecosystems
Transcript — May 3, 2023
Renew SBIR, Just Defend the Recipients against China
Report by Charles Wessner and Sujai Shivakumar — September 14, 2022
Renewing French Pharmaceutical Innovation—Lessons for the U.S.
Blog Post by Alexander Kersten and Benjamin Glanz — August 17, 2022
What Environmental Regulations Mean for Fab Construction
Blog Post by Hideki Tomoshige and Benjamin Glanz — July 11, 2022
RAI Explainer: the Small Business Innovation Research Program
Blog Post by Gabrielle Athanasia — July 8, 2022
Opportunities and Pitfalls for U.S.-EU Collaboration on Semiconductor Value Chain Resilience
Commentary by Sujai Shivakumar Charles Wessner and Thomas Howell — July 7, 2022