How well known is the term innovation deficit?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8076
“Behold the ‘innovation deficit,’” writes Science magazine’s Jeffrey Mervis to begin a 24 October article . He continues:
US science lobbyists coined the phrase last year to help make an economic argument for increasing federal funding of basic research, namely, that the current spending levels are too low for the United States to remain a global leader in innovation. Given political and budget realities, erasing this “deficit” anytime soon will take a minor miracle. But the phrase seems to be catching on, despite the fact that a one-time surge of funds could create its own problems.
Unscientific, anecdote-level Google sampling establishes that in recent years the phrase—actually coined well before 2013—has indeed caught on among academics and business people who concern themselves with science and technology issues. But if occurrences in general journalism are any indicator, the phrase appears to have some distance to go before it gains the household-word status that its promoters likely hope to see.
Among the R&D-minded themselves, though, the phrase is indeed flourishing. One organization even devotes itself to all that the phrase represents: Close the Innovation Deficit (also called InnovationDeficit.org ) calls itself “an effort by leaders of the business, higher education, scientific, and high-tech manufacturing communities who are concerned about cuts and stagnating federal investments in research and higher education at a time when other nations are pouring resources into these areas.”
On that site and elsewhere, it’s easy to find links to dozens of academically originated commentaries like the December 2013 Boston Globe op-ed “The innovation deficit: As the benefits of scientific research expand, federal funding shrinks.” That one’s from L. Rafael Reif, the electrical engineeer who serves as president of MIT.
In January 2010, Gary Locke, then US secretary of commerce, delivered “Remarks to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology .” We must “devote more resources to research and development—especially at the federal level,” he urged. Twice he spoke of what he called an “innovation deficit,” warning that it “simply must be a preeminent national priority.”
The next month, when Google’s Eric Schmidt published a Washington Post op-ed headlined “Erasing our innovation deficit,” he attributed the term to Locke. Later, in 2014, the Washington Post blurb “A four-minute explanation of why innovation is so important to the United States” linked to InnovationDeficit.org ‘s home page and its brief promotional film.
A 24 October search on the phrase at the New York Times yielded six hits going back to 2008. At the Wall Street Journal, the search yielded no hits. Still, Google News shows some attention by journalists to the term. Consider the opening paragraphs of the 6 March 2014 Financial Times article “US scientists deplore ‘innovation deficit’":
Scientists in the US remain the best funded in the world, but they say falling federal investment and cuts due to sequestration, coupled with the enormous resources other countries are lavishing on research, are creating an “innovation deficit.”
The consequence, say the presidents of more than 200 US universities, will be fewer US scientific and technological breakthroughs, fewer US patents and fewer US start-ups, products and jobs. Investment in research is not inconsistent with deficit reduction, indeed it is vital to it, they said in an open letter to President Barack Obama and members of Congress last summer.
The pressure researchers are coming under to justify federal funding was underlined last month in Chicago at one of their big annual conferences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The meeting, held every year since 1848, is intended to showcase the latest from the laboratory. This year however, the focus was not on research, but on innovation, entrepreneurship and the economy.
The FT piece went on to note that in the past, the general research practice was as it had been with fracking: government-funded researchers developed it, and decades later it boosted the economy. Now researchers participate more actively in commercialization, the FT pointed out. Moreover China, for example, “has tripled its R&D intensity” in the last decade and a half, illustrating the prospect that the US could fall from world innovation leadership.
Google yields hits for a few other occurrences of the phrase innovation deficit in the general press:
* The Guardian used the term in the headline of a March 2014 article about health care.
* The widely syndicated conservative columnist Cal Thomas published a piece on the innovation deficit back in 2011, lamenting not a decline in research funding, but what he called the decline of personal initiative and the willingness to work hard.
* The television political commentator Cokie Roberts and Steven V. Roberts published a January 2014 commentary under the headline “Diminishing the innovation deficit,” calling for more federal funding of biomedical research.
* The Atlantic in November 2011 ran a piece called “Innovation deficit disorder: A diagnosis for a sick economy.”
* In May 2014 Phys.org ran “Closing the US innovation deficit.”
And then there’s this: The Huffington Post has an innovation-deficit page , but it lists and links to only four articles.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.