A "Horizon Strategy" for Science and Technology Innovation

The Biden Administration and Congress announced new science and technology investments to re-establish our global leadership in critical industries and technologies—a vital step for the United States to keep pace in the Great Power Competition.

It’s easy to think of the Great Power Competition as being the new Cold War.

But at one of our recent “Grand Challenge Power Hour” events, Ash Carter, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and a current MITRE Distinguished Visiting Fellow, pointed out the reality is actually more complex.

“Like China today, the Soviet Union was a geopolitical, fundamental competitor. The difference was, we didn't trade with them. We put a plastic bag around them, so that nothing could come in and nothing could go out. With China, we're trying to trade with them while having a cold war—and that’s unique and why we need a new playbook.”

I’ve written before about how the United States must double down on deep-tech innovation. We’ve allowed our Great Power Competition adversaries like China to gain the advantage for many reasons. While dealing with stolen intellectual property and securing supply chains with a crucial trading partner are important factors, the greater issue is that our current investment models don’t value long-term, slow-return industrial innovation.

Over decades, the United States has shifted away from the large industrial labs like General Electric, Bell Labs, and Dupont that once led much of America’s technological advancement in the 20th century—often called the “Golden Age” of innovation. As the nature of corporate R&D investment in applied research has changed and federal R&D investments have tapered off in recent years, China’s top-down industrial policy is outpacing the United States in numerous vital sectors.

President Biden and Congress have proposed various new national efforts for federal investment in breakthrough technologies, such as the American Jobs Plan and The United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, to “secure our global leadership in the most critical and competitive new industries and technologies.” Biden has also tasked his incoming science advisor to review the nation’s science and technology enterprise and to develop recommendations on how to “continue to harness the full power of science and technology on behalf of the American people.”

But as we consider these major new investments in federal spending (which, adjusted for current dollars, could be bigger than the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program combined), how can we ensure that we get maximum return on our investment for American national and economic security?

MITRE recently released a new white paper I co-authored with Christopher Ford and Duane Blackburn, A “Horizon Strategy” Framework for Science and Technology Policy. There’s a lot to this complex topic, but here’s a quick look at some of the major challenges:

1. The net American R&D investment portfolio currently struggles to fill the chasm in the technology adoption life cycle between basic research and the development of specific, marketable commercial applications. This slows the pace and effectiveness of how new insights are carried forward into full deployment across a range of novel and evolved use cases. 
2. The current U.S. innovation model is also hampered by technological stovepipes. It presently works well in areas such as software and services but falls short with more capital-intensive and/or interdisciplinary work that is critical to meeting present-day challenges in key areas. 
3. Private sector actors often have neither the ability nor the incentive to address a range of broader, “ecosystem”-type challenges that are nonetheless essential to incorporating technology into the innovation economy. 

Powering a New Federal Agenda to Promoting S&T Innovation

To take on these market failures, a new national-level effort is necessary to create synergy between government, industry, and academic activities to holistically address our nation’s most critical science and technology (S&T) priorities—while safeguarding the intellectual property, privacy rights, and autonomy of all participants and stakeholders. 

This new strategy will need to prioritize and steer federal R&D funding to overcome weaknesses in the current innovation model and to bring “system-of-systems thinking” to bear on relevant “techno-system” challenges in prioritized areas. Its focus should be on interdisciplinary and cross-sector problems that, despite their national-level significance:

• are too “applied” for basic research but too “upstream” for marketization;
• are too intricate and capital-intensive for a startup;
• have time horizons too long, risk profiles too steep, and immediately monetizable payoffs too indirect or speculative to justify significant individual investment from most private firms; and/or
• involve a range of cross-sector coordination, public policy, legal/regulatory, and other governance questions that no single private-sector player could address on its own.

This report offers an intellectual framework to help shape such an approach and explains why certain key technology areas—advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate and energy, cybersecurity, health informatics, microelectronics, quantum information science, and telecommunications—would likely particularly reward federal attention as part of the Biden Administration’s new agenda.

I encourage you to read A “Horizon Strategy” Framework for Science and Technology Policy. And if you missed the live event, you may want to see the video MITRE Grand Challenges Power Hour: Charting New Horizons – A 21st Century Approach to S&T, featuring Ash Carter and a panel discussion with S&T experts.

China is both a fierce competitor and a vital trading partner. For our health, prosperity, and safety, the United States must recapture our “golden age” of science and technology innovation. We have an opportunity to design a national S&T strategy that could set the course of scientific discovery in America for years to come.

Let’s take it.