Advisers urge actions to bolster US innovation system

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) has added to the chorus of warnings that absent changes to R&D and innovation policies, the US will lose its technological competitiveness. In a report on the future of US research, PCAST called for curtailing burdensome and duplicative federal regulations on university research; expanding the R&D tax credit for industry; improving the stability and predictability of federal research funding; promoting collaborations among universities, industry, and national laboratories; and other measures.

At a 30 November briefing, White House science adviser John Holdren said the report’s overarching message is ‘the value, indeed the necessity for partnerships, of bringing together resources from government, academia, the private sector, and the philanthropic sector to make wholes that are greater than the sum of the parts.’

‘The research universities and the national laboratories are the hubs of any solution,’ said William Press, a computer science professor at the University of Texas at Austin and vice chair of the PCAST working group that wrote the report. ‘The universities educate the next generation and this anchors them geographically and regionally in ways that other institutions are not so anchored.’ Policies are needed to encourage universities both to continue their basic research mission and to actively connect to industry. The report calls for US R&D investments, both public and private, to reach 3% of GDP. That figure now stands at 2.9%, ranking the country in eighth place worldwide.

Funding stability

To achieve greater stability in federal funding, the report says other agencies could follow the example of the Department of Defense’s Future Years Defense Program, a five-year planning document that, while not having the force of law, shows a long-term, rational planning process that can persuade congressional appropriations committees to maintain funding. Press admitted that multiyear appropriations are unlikely anytime soon. But he said there used to be a closer connection between congressional authorization committees, which establish multiyear spending frameworks, and the appropriations committees. Today, he said, that relationship has become ‘a fictitious exercise.’

NSF director Subra Suresh said he ‘couldn’t agree more’ with the report’s call for stable funding. The US, he said, is the only developed nation that operates under an annual budget process. But in reality, he lamented, the funding process is even shorter term because of the prevalence of stopgap continuing resolutions. By contrast, he noted, the European Parliament and European Commission know what the European Union’s research budget will be for the next seven years, and the German Research Foundation has a five-year guaranteed budget.

Suresh lauded the report’s recommendation that universities step up their efforts to transfer their research to industry. NSF, he said, is already following PCAST’s recommendation for an increase in interdisciplinary research. Referring to interdisciplinary research, Press said, ‘There are a bunch of places where we believe the agencies could tune their merit review processes better to move out into those spaces.’ He urged the National Institutes of Health and other agencies to follow NSF’s lead.

Press acknowledged that few of the report’s recommendations are new. For example, countless other reports have pressed Congress to make permanent the R&D tax credit, which has been extended 14 times since its creation in 1981. PCAST also urged that the credit be increased from its current 14% of qualified research and experimentation costs to 20%.

William Banholzer, chief technology officer and executive vice president of Dow, said industry’s partnership with universities and labs is essential because ‘society doesn’t get a benefit for the most part until that knowledge is reduced to practice through some commercial entity.’ He said that the primary consideration for where Dow would locate an R&D facility is the availability of talent. ‘You also have to look at where the market is, and unfortunately, the display industry is now centered in [South] Korea, and we need to be right across the street from the people who are developing those products. You can’t send a jet-lagged, English-speaking engineer to Samsung to help them develop a display.’

Banholzer said that national labs should work to further streamline their processes for interacting with industry: ‘Universities are faster, more fickle, and can be more adaptive.’ Cooperative R&D agreements (CRADAs) with national laboratories take 6 to 12 months to get signed. ‘That’s just too long,’ he said. ‘In 12 months, the world can change on you.’ Modifications to a CRADA ‘require almost an act of Congress,’ he lamented. Changing the scope of work with Argonne National Laboratory, for example, required approval not only from the lab but from the University of Chicago, which operates the lab, and from the Department of Energy, which owns it. Said Banholzer, ‘At least one of the three is redundant.’