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How can developed economies like the United States and Canada prosper in a borderless, “flat” world defined by the rising science superpowers of China and India?

Some important innovation groups are struggling to answer these enormous and essential questions — and one of the reports I find most intriguing is Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. The report’s proposals cluster around three themes:

• Increase America’s talent pool by vastly improving K-12 math education. The “10,000 Teachers, 10 Million Minds” initiative would see robust four-year scholarships offered to 10,000 science and mathematics teachers — each of whom would presumably go on to impact 1,000 students over the course of their careers. Additional programs would improve the training and education of 250,000 teachers and increase the pipeline of students graduating high school with international baccalaureate (IB) standing in science and math courses.
  

• Sustain and strengthen basic, long-term research. The Academies call for a 10% increase in federal funding of basic research over the next seven years. In a phrase that resonates with us at MaRS, “Increasingly, the most significant new scientific and engineering advances are formed to cut across several disciplines.” Other projects would provide $500,000 in annual research funding (for five consecutive years) to 200 of the country’s most outstanding early-career researchers; create a five-year, $2.5 billion competitive national infrastructure investment fund; allocate 8% of federal research facilities’ budgets to discretionary spending; create a Department of Energy equivalent to DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency); and create a Presidential Innovation Award.
• Make the US the world’s most attractive country in which to study and perform research. Key initiatives under this heading include providing 25,000 new competitive scholarships for undergraduate students studying science, engineering and math; fund 5000 new focused graduate scholarships a year; use tax credits to encourage “life-long learning”; continue to improve visa processing for international students (including automatic 1-year visa extensions) and institute a new, skills-based, preferential immigration system.

Read alongside this the Conference Board of Canada’s sobering How Canada Performs: A Report Card on Canada (in which Canada’s innovation policy and performance was ranked a dismal “D” — see Mike’s post, “Conference Board to Canada: Start innovating”) and two things become immediately clear:

1. the enormity of the challenge facing the major economies of the developed world
2. the continued, impressive determination of policy advocates on both sides of the border to begin charting the right way forward

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