printable versionU.S. must continue innovating to remain economic powerhouse, panelists say
Forum examines challenges, opportunities that face next president in maintaining Americas competitive edge
BY LISA TREI
Meg Whitman, CEO and president of eBay Inc., gave the keynote address at last week’s SIEPR forum.
Jessica Flannery, co-founder of Kiva, spoke as part of a panel at the June 1 SIEPR forum on campus.
In the borderless world of the 21st century, Meg Whitman, CEO and president of eBay Inc., said the United States no longer holds a monopoly on innovation that made it the economic juggernaut of the last century.
"The question is, can America continue to sustain that economic advantage?" Whitman asked an audience of students, faculty, entrepreneurs and policy experts at a June 1 forum on the challenges and opportunities facing the next U.S. president in developing policies that will maintain the nation's competitive edge in a global economy.
Whitman considered whether the United States can lead innovation during the next 50 years as it did in the last half century, and whether it can do so in an environment "where innovation is rapid and disruptive, where reinventing business and academic institutions is critical for survival, and where prosperity is contingent on repeatedly leapfrogging into uncharted territory in science and technology." How America's next president tackles such challenges, Whitman said, will determine this country's continued prosperity as well as that of the rest of the world.
Whitman delivered a forward-looking keynote speech at the end of a day filled with presentations on innovation, the role of research universities in fostering new ideas, and how government can help or hinder future breakthrough advances. The United States must improve its K-12 education, particularly in math and science, Whitman said, to keep pace with emerging economies in developing countries that provide many of the engineers and scientists hired by U.S. firms today. With a growing number of opportunities for foreign entrepreneurs to be successful in their home countries, she said, the United States must continue to attract leading innovators. One way to do this, Whitman suggested, would be to give doctoral students an immigration green card when they graduate from U.S. universities. She also urged America's next president to keep access to the Internet free and open, and to support the rapid expansion of low-cost Internet broadband throughout the country.
The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) held the daylong forum, "Innovation Policy for the Next President," which attracted dozens of undergraduate students majoring in economics who presented class projects during poster sessions. The biannual event exposes students to in-depth analysis of leading economic issues. It also allows SIEPR to foster connections with experts and policy specialists, and to provide a venue for faculty and students to exchange ideas. In 2006, the forums focused on education and energy policy issues. Last week's gathering showcased the work of Graduate School of Business student Jessica Flannery, the co-founder of KIVA, a microfinance organization that uses the Internet to facilitate direct loans between lenders and recipients. It also featured an upbeat presentation from Felix Kramer, founder of the California Car Initiative, which advocates the manufacturing of plug-in hybrid cars to help fight global warming.
Representatives from the presidential campaigns of John McCain, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, and the Senate staff of candidate Barack Obama, also presented overviews of their bosses' innovation platforms. They stressed the importance of improving K-12 education and ensuring federal support for basic research to sustain America's leadership role and competitive edge in the 21st century.
President John Hennessy, a recognized innovator, discussed how research universities help to foster innovation. "We have built the best research funding system, which is merit-based and peer-reviewed," he said. "[Innovation] begins with great faculty who are risk takers." Hennessy also highlighted the ability of students to look at a problem a second time and come up with a better solution. For example, he said, in the late 1990s, then-President Gerhard Casper was frustrated when he typed his name into Internet search engines and hundreds of hits appeared for Casper the Friendly Ghost. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who were then computer science graduate students at Stanford, decided to tackle the problem of retrieving relevant information from a massive set of data, which ultimately led to the launch of the Google-patented search engine in 1998. Hennessy said when Brin demonstrated the new search technology, which resolved Casper's problem, he knew the students had made a critical breakthrough.
Despite such important successes, Hennessy said research universities remain dependent on attracting foreign talent because the United States does not produce enough qualified technology specialists. "This is a 10-, 15-, 20-year problem, but we have to strengthen math and science in K-12 education," he said. Beyond that, he said, the nation must develop alternative energy sources to tackle global warming, as well as find solutions to the looming crises in healthcare and social security.
