Last month the National Research Council released a report titled “Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.” The report argues, “The unmatched vitality of the United States’ economy and science and technology enterprise has made this country a world leader for decades, allowing Americans to benefit from a high standard of living and national security. But in a world where advanced knowledge is widespread and low-cost labor is readily available, U.S. advantages in the marketplace and in science and technology have begun to erode. A comprehensive and coordinated federal effort is urgently needed to bolster U.S. competitiveness and pre-eminence in these areas so that the nation will consistently gain from the opportunities offered by rapid globalization.”

Writing at SciDev.net Caroline S. Wagner and Calestous Juma take issue with the report’s focus on science as a area of competition among nations. They write, “The National Academy of Sciences report encourages an ‘us and them’ mentality within knowledge systems that can only exacerbate political instabilities and resentment.”

Instead, Wagner and Juma argue for a collaborative approach to realizing the benefits of global knowledge,

“Although each countries’ individual scientific output is still duly attributed to them, knowledge transcends national boundaries. And the new knowledge networks are being continually created within global networks of colleagues sharing resources and ideas. It would be highly inefficient for every country to recreate the entire infrastructure needed for a robust knowledge economy. Success is defined by the ability to forge links that largely depend on one’s attractiveness as a partner. And this is a two-way street. Any nation that sees science and technology as a way to build national strength discovers that the knowledge available from the global network is an asset that can be used, added to, and exploited locally. Scientific protectionism, on the other hand, denies nations access to knowledge that forms the lifeline of any innovation system.”

The debate between the NRC and Wagner/Juma is over what sort of problem the United States faces, or even if there is a problem. Before we can understand what sorts of actions make sense, it is important to know what kind of problem those actions are to deal with. The debate is complicated not only because of the complexities of international economics and politics, but also because the supply and demand for scientific expertise have been used somewhat disingenuously by the U.S. scientific community (e.g., see this exchange) in the early 1990s as a Trojan horse argument to justify more funding for research. The issue of national competitiveness and scientific innovation takes the form of debates over immigration policy, science policy, innovation policy and even tax and trade policies. It also manifests itself in debate over the “outsourcing” of jobs, patent and intellectual property rights and the broader debates on globalization and development.

Clearly, this is an important area of discussion with practical implications, and even in the context of decades of discussion of technology policy, we seem to be in the early stages of deciding what sort of issue we are grappling with. Those of us with interests in science and technology policy should be spending some time thinking about these issues, as they are certain to occupy an increasing amount of attention among decision makers.

To learn more about this area, check out this syllabus from a course taught at Harvard by Calestous Juma, “Technological Innovation and Development Policy.”