Judy Estrin, 53, has spent her entire career in Silicon Valley, a region that thrives on constant innovation. Estrin, the former chief technology officer of Cisco Systems, has founded four technology companies.
Yet she is deeply worried that Silicon Valley — and the US as a whole — no longer fosters the kind of innovation necessary to develop groundbreaking technologies and sustain economic growth.
“I am generally not an alarmist, but I have become more and more concerned about the state of our country and its innovation,” she said last week, explaining why she wrote her book, Closing the Innovation Gap, which arrived in bookstores yesterday. “We have a national innovation deficit.”
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Estrin’s book is the latest call to action during the last several years by scientists, technologists and political leaders worried about the country’s future competitiveness in technology.
In 2005, the National Academies published Rising Above the Gathering Storm, a report requested by the US Congress, which found that federal financing of research in the physical sciences was 45 percent less in 2004 than in 1976 and that 93 percent of students in grades five through eight learn science from teachers who do not hold degrees or certifications in the topics.
Last year the book Innovation Nation by John Kao, a business consultant, revived the debate.
And this year, both presidential candidates have made government support of innovation and technology a central part of their campaign platforms.
Still, not all technology watchers agree with Estrin about the extent of the innovation problem — or whether there is a problem at all.
“The whole innovation crisis thing is a bit overblown,” said Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster.
Innovation in the natural world, in the form of mutation, is lethal, so species do it only when they are under dire stress, he said.
“What makes Silicon Valley unique is that this place has stumbled onto a way to sustain innovation even when the place is doing well,” he said.
Estrin argues that short-term thinking and a reluctance to take risks are causing a noticeable lag in innovation.
She cites a variety of contributing factors. A decline in federal and university financing for research has dried up new ideas, she said. When research does produce new technologies, entrepreneurs and the venture capitalists who back them have been too cautious to make big bets — especially after the costly failures of the dot-com bust.
If startup companies do find financing, she said, new regulations make it hard for them to grow, and the focus of investors on short-term performance discourages companies from taking risks.
Estrin’s suggestions for bolstering innovation range from the vague, like advising venture capitalists and entrepreneurs to take more risks, to the specific, like mandating that schools pay teachers higher salaries.
Some of her prescriptions are unlikely to become reality, like her idea for a new government body modeled after the Federal Reserve that sets science policy without congressional input.
Some thinkers on innovation agree with Estrin’s assessment.
“There is a remarkable telescoping in of vision and an unwillingness to make long-term bets,” said Vinton Cerf, the chief Internet evangelist at Google.
Cerf led the development of the networking protocols that form the basic architecture of the Internet, a project to which Estrin contributed as a graduate student. He points to the Internet as an example of the need for long-term research and financing, since development of the technology used to transmit data online required two decades of government support.
Robert Compton, a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, said that the US is losing its innovation edge to China and India. Chinese and Indian children are required to take more science courses than students in the US, said Compton, who recently produced a documentary comparing high school education in the three countries.
Of college graduates, 30 percent to 45 percent in India and China have engineering degrees, compared with 5 percent in the US. Venture financing and patent applications are falling in Europe and the US and rising in China and India, Compton said.
Most alarming to Compton is that 60 percent of engineering doctorates from US universities are granted to foreign nationals, but they are no longer staying here to work.
“The American economy is not as exciting as China and India, and a lot of them are going back home,” he said.
Estrin and others acknowledge that the recent surge in financing for alternative energy companies is a sign that innovation is alive and well in some sectors. Still, she is concerned that investors will not have the patience to build these companies.
“If they treat these companies the same way they treated others — a couple years in, they need to see returns or cut the burn rate or start cutting people — they are not going to get to where we need to go,” she said.
Some who track innovation in the US say the alarm bells are unnecessary and sound like a repeat of similar fears in past decades that turned out to be unfounded.
A June study from RAND Corp found that 40 percent of the world’s spending on scientific research and development comes from the US. The country employs 70 percent of the world’s Nobel Prize winners and is home to 75 percent of the top 40 universities.
“The United States is still the world leader in science and technology,” said the study’s co-author, James Hosek.
But Estrin said that the technologies at the root of new products like Apple’s iPod or the Facebook social networking service were actually developed several decades ago. If a new round of fundamental innovation isn’t seeded now, the country will suffer in the next decade.
She compared the situation to a tree that appears to be growing well, but whose roots are rotting underground.
“Too much of it is short-term, incremental innovation, and the roots of the tree aren’t happy,” she said.
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