China, U.S. lead innovation, Europe nowhere, says survey

7/2/2012 7:10 AM EDT

Interesting to know that many people believe China will lead in disruptive technology. What steps should the US government needs to take so that they can maintan the leading edge in tech innovation ?

7/2/2012 9:26 AM EDT

There is a growing school of thought among China watchers in the U.S. that it is in fact a "second generation innovator." The leading proponent of this view is Dan Breznitz of Georgia Tech, who argues in his book with Michael Murphree titled "Run of the Red Queen" that, just like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, China must run in place just to keep up with western innovators. So far, this approach has worked well for China, with Foxconn and other major electronics manufacturers dominating that market. It's anyone's guess how long it will take China to catch up with western innovators.

7/2/2012 10:34 AM EDT

The signs are that many eastern hemisphere countries take technology seriously as a means of generating wealth and elevating the standard of living of the population.

The western hemisphere increasingly doesn't.

Witness the United Kingdom's finance services based economy and the resultant $300 million fine for Barclays Bank.

In the west young people seem disinclined to embark on STEM degrees and STEM-based careers, prefering the idea of banking, legal, medical and celebrity careers. In consequence the west spends a lot of time teaching young people who are educational immigrants from the east.

With that in mind let's ask again where we think the next hub of technology innovation is likely to occur?

7/2/2012 5:24 PM EDT

It is impossible to know without consideration of IP law. Not only America Invents Act (harmonization of America's premier patent systems with the rest of the world). American Inventors got sold out by America's Legislative and Executive Branches. An un-Constitutional, heavily lobbied effort, succeeded, changing our Founder's First to Invent scheme to First to File, exactly what the Founders opposed. Fact, King George owned the IP of the colonists. But, with ACTA and other international treaties, it looks like copyright owners will play a role in how "innovation" proceeds. Bet yet, whether any political system can properly reward Inventors as successfully as the original Patent Act of 1790.

7/2/2012 5:55 PM EDT

I thought it was illuminating to see the article about vaccuum transistors, at University of Pittsburgh, where the prof and one of the grad students were Korean, and the other grad student maybe Malay or perhaps Indonesian. (At least, going by their names.)

The good news might be, it is the institutional culture in academia and in government, let's hope anyway, that keeps the US in the groove. As long as we don't let those fundamentals change, we may be okay. If we start allowing some of these basics to change, either to more nannie-government control, or bowing to religious restrictions, or whatever else other countries like to do that we have historically shunned, that's when I think things will degrade badly.

7/2/2012 9:03 PM EDT

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7/2/2012 9:31 PM EDT

In the next 10 years,China will be unlikely to appear disruptive technology !

7/2/2012 10:05 PM EDT

Well Europe does have the Hadron collider, which helps propel science along, and in turn, technology. I would be hesitant to write off Europe.

7/2/2012 11:03 PM EDT

Peter, would it be possible to print out the survey rank results? Thanks!

7/3/2012 1:53 AM EDT

Associate Editor of Nano letter

Yi Cui
Stanford University
Naomi Halas

Rice University
ECE Department, MS-366
Prof. Jianguo Hou
Department of Physics
University of Science and Technology of China

Hongkun Park
Professor of Chemistry and of Physics
Harvard University
Joachim P. Spatz

Max Planck Institute for Metals Research & University of Heidelberg
Younan Xia

Brock Family Chair and GRA Eminent Scholar in Nanomedicine
The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University Medical School

7/3/2012 6:04 AM EDT

KPMG as ever effecting no useful utility merely moneymaking from illusory insight that's merely historical hogwash
Said as someone who saw the stupidity of EConomic EUtrophication from late 90s FP4 that cost 10x more per accredited output as peered paper or published patent than contemporary DTI counterparts that in turn cost 10x more than traditional Brit PhDs with only alphas allowed as men and mentors.
Said as someone who floored politico panellists at the Lisbon Agenda for their Millennial Mission to catchup US RTD productivity by 2010, simply by selfevident assertion that more of the same ineffectualities will only strengthen the shortfalls signifying moreover the madness of Brussellian Bureauggery that's now extinguished EUroland with its ERDF granted leveraging of unrepayable indebtedness.
Said as someone who argued against KPMG's leadership of WM RDA cronied with Bliarownian Bonkernmics kowtowers hellbent on postindustrial financial frippery that not only killed our employable economy but at long last seen to be corrupt collusion as selfevident sensibility to all educated honest johns screwed by these scamengers.
Said as someone who won four DTI SMARTees as national #1 indeed at that time with a campus company created for defconX subsea superstealth gizmogames and done a decade before these things became fashionably faddish academic accoutrements after Bliarownian derisking with publicly pursed slushsidies asserted essential as assistance for an enterprise economy.
Said as someone who was last redbrick faculty teaching field theorems to hons engrg finalists, stuff that'd been sixties freshers fodder, stuff that guaranteed bestofbunch clamoured to stay on for PhDs despite ludicrously lucred lures from cityspivvery, those lads now near to treetopping around global corporate makers (not meddlers nor manipulators) pleased as punch for confidence given them to boo the goosing of MBAed snakeoilers .. continued

7/3/2012 6:05 AM EDT

selling software sillies simply by asking for awareness of filed fundamentals as bonafides and of course only getting blank banalities, stuff that got this someone sacked for refusing to remove it as repeatedly demanded by academic apparatchiks asserting needless stressing of benched bums recruited for fees not skills.
And that was mid90s, leaving me blackballed at fifty with no way back despite endorsements of grandee gurus, CamUni topdogs indeed in Lighthill and Batchelor and Crighton as DAMTPosaurus Rex of their generation - google to be awestruck. Irony then that just last week we had league leading Russell Redbricks squealing notmeguv in response to accusations of favouring overseas premium feepayers by selective easing of entry standards, big differentials indeed meaning double standards in skills just as I'd encountered, moreover with dissatisfied cash clients endangering revenues by badmouthing their institutions for failing to deliver the degrees they'd been told to expect! All part and parcel of the problem that's plonked us in the proverbial reported here, now well on the way to hell in a handcart! @NEALETHOMASnet

7/3/2012 7:29 AM EDT

@NealeThomasNet

This topic seems to have got you excited, almost angry.

Your writing has a certain poetic quality but the words you create and obscure references make it very dense and probably hard for someone not familiar with the United Kingdom to understand.

7/3/2012 10:43 AM EDT

Typical consultancy rubbish. If KPMG can name me one current innovator in China I will give them a $1m. Size or quantity does not equal innovation. Not sure that any "innovation" has come out of Asia in 50 years (engineering incrementalism is not innovation). Innovation is about mindset and creativity. These are not strong suits of asian society or educational system. Get off the China bandwagon and remember the Japanese bandwagon....

7/3/2012 11:50 AM EDT

One needs to take these reports on China only with a huge 'heap' of salt ! Most likely these are bought and paid for by Companies trying to curry favor with China - and mislead / lure US and Western Co.s to xfer even their R&D to China.

It is also no coincidence that the KPMG Exec quoted by Peter is named Tudor Aw, a dead giveaway that he is a Chinaman from either Hong Kong or Singapore, where they affect monikers derived from the heritage of their British Colonial Masters in the pathetic hope of having a shot at instant respectability ! These pseudo - westernized "overseas" Chinese act as pilot fish & touts for the MainLand Chinese.

As to the substance of the "report", since the early 1990s Consulting Co.s of KPMG's ilk have been misleading Western Co.s to invest in China that has turned into a one way haemorrhage of competitiveness & capacity and destroyed once leading US companies like Motorola.

And before the Mainland Chinese themsleves get too carried away with more chest thumping about their potential for innovation, let us just point out that their Space Capsules etc. look surprisingly similar to Soviet spacecrafts of Souyz vintage. The Chinese used their sweatshops to make money from the West and then used that loot to buy starving Russian scientists on the cheap. All this for legitimizing the rule by the CCP ( Communist Party of China ) as well as cheap bragging rights for their rising middle classes.

The same goes for the accomplishmnets of millions of Chinese grad students now ensconced in US academia and industry thanks to the influence of their patrons in Wall St.

7/3/2012 11:50 AM EDT

Chinese culture is one of proliferation ( 300 ways to cook a dead pig ! and these days hundreds of experiments to develop processes instead of using theory or simulation ) rather than profundity through their long history they never managed to think it through to develop a concise alphabet ( or a cosmology / religion / ideology of their own, thus having to chase after Buddhism from India and later Communism from Russia ) !

Confucianism and conformism ( and thus the widespread acceptance of regimentation by the Communist Party ) go hand in hand. There is no room there for straight talk that is a pre-requisite for innovation. But what the Chinese do have in spades is their strength in numbers, playing Possum when it suits them ( a Miss Saigon style deviousness ) and the ability of the CCP to marshal these illiberal qualities for political & business negotiations to gain an unfair advantage.

It is these traditional attributes of the Chinese and not any sudden outburst of innovativeness that are most real and what we need to be wary of. Its not yet too late to learn from our experience in dealing with China for the last quarter century and make course corrections.

For as they say " Fool me once the shame is on you - fool me twice the shame is on me ".

7/3/2012 12:21 PM EDT

Fortunately, R&D costs are not considered targets for reduction in the US, right?

7/3/2012 12:36 PM EDT

A future innovation you can name now is not a true innovation. If you are working on something everyone already knows about, how creative is that? As history shows, the truly life-changing innovations could not be predicted.

7/3/2012 1:11 PM EDT

Reply to Chipmonk: under the same Confucianism, the Chinese invented paper making, printing tech, compass and Gun powder. Those were all disruptive innovations and changed the world!

7/3/2012 6:15 PM EDT

By what metrics do you define the technology innovation center? Number of patents? Startups? IPOs?

7/3/2012 9:26 PM EDT

china sucks

7/4/2012 8:54 AM EDT

Yeah, not having Europe there makes you worry about the open-mindedness of executives.

7/4/2012 1:40 PM EDT

Talk is irrelevant. The movement is to the East. As prosperity rises so does innovation and vice versa. Adapt or fade away.

7/6/2012 10:09 PM EDT

Why is everyone getting worked up over being the place to foster "disruptive technology breakthroughs"? When do those breakthroughs ever get commercialized?

7/7/2012 12:46 AM EDT

I think innovation is fed by a healthy spirit. Those factors which free and enoble the spirit will also foster innovation.

7/9/2012 8:30 AM EDT

Innovation will happen where the money is. Also, the production will happen where people/government are ready to invest the billions of dollars needed.

Both look grim for the moment in europe. Don't really see any company in the EU with the resources to build the 450 mm wafer fabs that's coming in the next ten years or so.

I'm not afraid that we'll stop producing good scientific results. IMEC, Fraunhofer and the rest of the institutes are world class enough for that. I'm afraid that we will continue developing stuff that is either bought up by american companies before take-off or commercialized in Asia instead.

One reason that europe lags behind is that we in a way are too close to the US culturally and economically. People with good ideas go from europe to silicon valley or are pretty ready to sell their companies to the more established american ones. Sometimes it feels like europe is the equivalent of farm teams in the NHL. Create talent that's later used by other teams.