Commentary | Judy Estrin’s “The Innovation Gap”

I don’t know if it was planned to coincide with the eve of the Large Hadron Collider’s maiden launch or if it was pure coincidence, but last Tuesday CSIS hosted Judy Estrin for a discussion on her recent book, Closing the Innovation Gap, about the poor state of science and technology research and development in this country and how to fix it. Judy Estrin boasts a very successful career as both a scientist and a businesswoman; starting as a researcher at Stanford working with Vint Cerf, the father of the internet, she eventually landed herself in Fortune Magazine’s 50 most powerful women in American business on multiple occasions. Along the way she founded three successful technology companies and currently sits on the board of The Walt Disney Company and FedEx Corporation. Her credentials are truly astounding, but what makes her really special, in her opinion, is that she has no experience in Washington. She admittedly is not a policy wonk, so one can only imagine the anxiety she must have felt entering CSIS, home of some of the most influential and experienced minds in Washington -- like Daniel entering the lion’s den is probably a good guess.

Judy Estrin is also an unabashed idealist. She says that as a scientist she must be. She believes that solutions to our current problems are out there if we’re willing to devote time to search for them and to be patient enough to look through all the muck. The picture is not all rosy, however. Her main gripe is that our government has been too short-sighted in its thinking, especially when funding science and technology research. If we want to stay competitive, especially against emerging powers like India and China, we need to not only be more generous with our funding, but we also need an attitude check. Our government needs to look to the future, both to avoid any foreseeable disasters and to embrace the potential breakthroughs of tomorrow (where tomorrow is actually 20 years from now). According to Estrin, investment in science and technology has been especially pitiful over the past decade, with our attention on other things like the War on Terror, and will have severe consequences in the future. She compares it to root rot, arguing that shortsightedness is crippling future innovation without us even knowing it.

Her message is powerful and she makes it convincingly, but it is not new. Many influential people have been sounding the alarm for decades. So what do we do with this information? It is not productive to debate whether or not an innovation gap actually exists. If somehow it was discovered that it didn’t and that we were actually light years ahead of everyone else, would it limit our curiosity or subdue our desire to invent? Hopefully not. Nor is it productive to pass around pie in the sky ideas and forget about real-life solutions. Our government, for better or for worse, is designed to prevent revolutionary change, to protect the rights of the doubters and the naysayers. Therefore, we need to focus on incremental change. We should invest more in science and technology in K-12 education. We should promote international student exchanges, not just to bring the best and brightest from abroad to the United States, but also to allow American students to study at foreign institutions and become more globally-minded. We should allocate funds more evenly to different areas of science and technology research, not just to headline grabbing projects, so as not to miss any potential innovations. We need to develop policy and funding objectives that look beyond the next 2-4 years. Estrin also advocates engendering a culture of innovation. I don’t know how we would promote innovation – I don’t think we understand it well enough to do that – but we do have the capacity to promote invention.

In her presentation, Estrin argued that the United States needs another a “Sputnik moment,” one that arouses passionate, national sentiment and that ushers in a time of great innovation. In my opinion, however, the primary motivator behind U.S. investment in science and technology following Sputnik was fear. Unfortunately, as humans we’re much better about reacting to situations that have already happened than we are predicting ones that may arise, and it may take some epoch-making event to make us start paying attention to the innovation gap.
Chris Hall is an intern at the CSIS Global Strategy Institute.