NSB Releases 2008 S&E Indicators

On January 15, 2008, In American Competitiveness Initiative, Funding, Policy, Research, By MelissaNorr

The National Science Board released the 2008 Science and Engineering Indicators today at an event on Capitol Hill. Board Chair Steven Beering, Subcommittee Chair Louis Lanzerotti, and Arthur Reilly presented the Science and Engineering Indicators, the Digest of Key S&E Indicators, and a companion policy recommendation document, Research and Development: Essential Foundation for US Competitiveness in a Global Economy. Dr. Arden Bement and Dr. Kathie Olsen also attended the event and participated in the Q&A session at the end.
While the entire document can be found online, the event highlighted some specific findings of the 2008 S&E Indicators, including:

  • world science and engineering activities are shifting from the US and Europe, the traditional leaders, to Asia.
  • US share of high tech manufacturing has stayed above 30 percent over the last twenty years
  • Two-thirds of US R&D funding comes from industry and only 28 percent is from the federal government
  • 2007 had a major downward curve in constant dollars of federal support for academic research
  • Defense research, mostly development, accounts for over half of all federal R&D
  • China’s PhD attainment is on a steep up curve but is still significantly below the US
  • There has been an increase in S&E bachelors degrees in the US in all fields EXCEPT computing
  • Most foreign born PhD candidates in the US plan to stay in the US
  • 80 percent of the public supports federal funding of basic research and 40 percent believe there is too little federal funding of basic research

The policy companion piece includes three broad recommendations. They are:

  • The federal government should take action to enhance the level of funding for, and the transformational nature of, basic research
  • Industry, government, the academic sector, and professional organizations should take action to encourage greater intellectual interchange between industry and academia. Industry researchers should also be encouraged to participate as authors and reviewers for articles in open, peer-reviewed publications.
  • New data are critically needed to track the implications for the US economy of the globalization of manufacturing and services in high technology industries, and this need should be addressed expeditiously by relevant federal agencies.

During the Q&A, Bement said that investment in basic research drives the economy and that it is not just dollars but also talent. In response to a question about why students would go into science and engineering instead of fields with better job prospects, Olsen said that the data found that demand for science and engineering majors in industry is increasing but students don’t realize the options that are out there for a science or engineering degree.

 
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The Long Nose of Innovation

On January 3, 2008, In Funding, FY08 Appropriations, Policy, R&D in the Press, Research, By Peter Harsha

There’s an interesting piece running now in BusinessWeek by Microsoft Researcher Bill Buxton that capitalizes on the buzz around the concept of the “long tail” in business by arguing that there’s an equally important “long nose” in business innovation that represents the long period of research and development that’s required to bring innovative products to market. Here’s a snip:

My belief is there is a mirror-image of the long tail that is equally important to those wanting to understand the process of innovation. It states that the bulk of innovation behind the latest “wow” moment (multi-touch on the iPhone, for example) is also low-amplitude and takes place over a long period—but well before the “new” idea has become generally known, much less reached the tipping point. It is what I call The Long Nose of Innovation.

It’s a great article and certainly worth reading in full.
In the piece, he mentions a chart Butler Lampson presented to the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council that traced the history of a number of key technologies. That’s this chart (frequently referred to as the “tire tracks” chart, for reasons that should be apparent). The chart originally appeared in a 1995 CSTB report, in which the CSTB had identified 9 billion-dollar sectors in the IT economy that bore the stamp of federally-supported research. They revised the chart in 2003 and identified 10 more sectors. I’m guessing that if they revised it again today (and I understand they are), you could at add least three more billion-dollar sectors — “Search,” “Social Networks,” and “Digital Video” — all enabled in some way by long-term research, usually supported by the federal government … exactly the type of long-term research that got hit hardest in this year’s appropriations debacle.
(Ed Lazowska’s testimony before the House Government Reform committee in 2004 contains an extended riff on the chart — how it shows the complex interplay between federally-supported university-based research and industrial R&D efforts; how industry based R&D is a fundamentally different character than university-based R&D; how the chart illustrates how interdependent the IT R&D ecosystem really is; and how university-based research produces not just ideas, but people, too. It’s all under the section titled “The Ecosystem that Gives Birth to New Technologies,” though the whole testimony is certainly worth a read, too.)

 
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