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PANEL II
INNOVATION CLUSTERS AND THE 21ST CENTURY
UNIVERSITY
Moderator:
Carl Dahlman
Georgetown University
This symposium offers “a fantastic opportunity to have a lot of
exchange and understand a lot of the challenges we face,” said Carl
Dahlman, a former World Bank economist who has done extensive work
on China and India. He said he hopes “we also will be able to come up
with some very concrete things for work in the future, including very
specific collaborations.”
To put the panel discussion on university innovation clusters in
context, Dr. Dahlman noted that a university has three big roles. Its first
mission is to train high-level human capital, “which is important not only
for science and technology but also more generally for managing
economies,” he said. The second is advancing knowledge. The third is
applying knowledge from universities, or in other words to transfer
technology.
China has made very rapid progress in higher education, Dr. Dahlman
noted. Enrollment rates have risen from 2 percent in 1980 to 23 percent
today. Now, China has more people in universities, 25 million students,
than the United States, with 17 million. Forty percent of Chinese college
students study math, science, and engineering. “That is a very impressive
accomplishment,” he said. Dr. Dahlman also noted that many Chinese
students study in foreign universities. The largest number of foreign
students in the United States is from China, “so we have a lot of
exchange that way,” he said. “Now we have to see how we can get more
students from the United States into Chinese universities to further our
understanding.”
China is the world’s third-largest spender on research and
development measured in terms of purchasing-power parity, Dr.
Dahlman added, and may soon surpass Japan as No. 2 within five years.
China also spends a greater portion of its R&D money in universities
than most other nations, including the United States.
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66 BUILDING THE 21ST CENTURY: U.S.-CHINA COOPERATION
In terms of transferring knowledge, China has made “dramatic
progress” in setting up all kinds of science and innovation parks, Dr.
Dahlman said. “I think we are very lucky to have with us one of the key
people behind that,” referring to speaker Lou Jing of China’s Ministry of
Education. The panel also featured presidents from two universities.
Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering, also is
president emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dan Mott
from the University of Maryland, that is very active in technology
transfer. The panel also includes a presentation by Ginger Lew of the
Obama Administration on setting up university innovation clusters in the
United States. “We are going to have a very rich discussion,” he said. He
urged each of the speakers to think of concrete areas and specific projects
for further collaboration.
Universities, Science Parks, and Clusters in China’s Innovation
Ecosystem
Lou Jing
Ministry of Education
Universities play a very important role in China’s strategy to build an
innovation society, explained Ms. Lou, deputy director of the Ministry of
Education’s Department of Science and Technology.
China has an “ecosystem of innovation that is diverse, stable, and
self-adjustable, and flexible,” Ms. Lou said. China’s goal is to be a
leading source of research and development to “promote the
development of the economy and society of China and even help develop
global science and technology and world civilization,” she said.
Universities are an essential element in this innovation environment.
Other innovation communities in this environment include the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences,
corporate R&D departments, research institutes specializing in
economics and in social development, and the Chinese research
organizations of multinationals such as IBM, Intel, and Cisco. This
ecosystem also includes public-service organizations that evaluate
patents and provide intermediary services. Ms. Lou described this
environment as a “system of innovation with Chinese characteristics.”
The foundation of an innovation environment is a “knowledge
innovation system that organically combines scientific research and
higher education,” Ms. Lou said. “This system’s core, breakthrough
point is business-based, market-oriented, and comprised of industry,
academia, and research.” To produce distinct results, Ms. Lou said, the
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PANEL II-INNOVATION CLUSTERS
innovation system must “take into account different regions’ respective
characteristics and advantages.” It also needs a “socialized, network
technology intermediary service system,” she said, which will “require
additional effort” in China.
A “national innovation system with Chinese characteristics” must be
comprehensive, she said. It should include scientific innovation,
technological innovation, product innovation, industry innovation,
system innovation, cultivation of innovative talent, and an innovative
culture, Ms. Lou said. It also should be “networked, diverse, dynamic,
open, and inclusive.” Management and operation systems also are
required.
Ms. Lou outlined the major tasks of a national innovation system.
One is to strengthen original innovation, integrate innovation from
different sources, and encourage “re-innovation” by improving on
technologies introduced into the country. Another task is to “create a
better environment to cultivate innovative talent and leadership,
especially those with special insights,” she said. “We also have to
cultivate an innovation spirit and atmosphere in our entire society.”
As elsewhere in the world, universities in China are assuming a
greater role and mission. “We all know that in the 21st century
innovation has become a driving force behind a country’s economic
development,” Ms. Lou said. “Countries around the world are
endeavoring to raise their ability to innovate scientifically and
technologically, placing a high priority on cultivating talent and building
energetic innovation.”
The first mission of universities is “to serve as an engine or original
source of a country’s core competitiveness,” Ms. Lou said. She noted
that universities are involved in science and technology, education, the
economy, and society. “Universities contribute greatly to the rise and
development of a great power, and are closely connected with the
country’s industrialization and modernization processes,” she observed.
Elite universities are the core of China’s research establishment. They
account for three-fourths of scientific theses. Of those university theses,
around 75 percent come from the top 50 schools, she noted. A third role
for universities is to “cultivate innovative talent,” she said.
Universities have long been an essential force for innovation in China
and “have solved or participated in solving major science and technology
problems for China’s economy. They also are involving in transferring
and transforming technologies, Ms. Lou said. “Universities’ continuous
development in technology achievements brings a closer collaboration
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68 BUILDING THE 21ST CENTURY: U.S.-CHINA COOPERATION
between academia, industry, and research institutes and demonstrates
their potential for leadership,” she said.
China’s economic transition and modern technology trends makes
contributions from universities even more important. Ms. Lou explained
that China has growing demand innovative talent, new technology, and
new knowledge. “The cycle of transforming knowledge into
commodities has shortened,” she said. “The relationship between science
and technology innovation and national demand will be even closer,
while demand will be higher.”
Cultivating top research talent has become “our major task” in the
past few years, Ms. Lou said. The goal is to “continuously provide
innovation—not just fast but outstanding achievements,” she said.
Universities also provide technology transfer, strategic consultation, and
other services. She noted that the 17th Party Congress called for
establishing research bodies of high standards in universities to support a
national innovation system that will increase China’s competitiveness.
“We want very concrete results,” she said.
Universities are major repositories of high-level Chinese innovation
talent, Ms. Lou observed. They employ 562 faculty that account for 40
percent of members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the
Chinese Academy of Engineering. Universities also have 902 recipients
of support from the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young
Scholars1 program, accounting for 63.3 percent of total. Universities host
73 “outstanding national innovation communities,” 52 percent of the
total.
The Chinese Ministry of Education operates a special “high-level
innovation talent cultivation program,” Ms. Lou said. The program funds
1,108 Cheung Kong Scholars,2 2,452 Outstanding Innovation Teams,
3,776 scholars classified as New Century Excellent Talents, and 126
innovation bases. “These figures show we are enhancing the cultivation
of innovative talents and have seen some positive results,” she said.
1
The National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars provides four-
year grants of 2 million RMB to scholars, focusing on those under the age 45,
who have made “outstanding achievements in basic research.” Recipients select
their own research direction. The goal is to “foster a group of prominent
academic pacemakers in the forefront of world science and technology.”
2
The Cheung Kong Scholars program was established in 2005 by the Li Ka
Shing Foundation and the Ministry of Education. It awards stipends on top of
regular salaries and benefits to outstanding scholars in China, Hong Kong, and
Macau.
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The nation’s research infrastructure is heavily concentrated in
universities. Sixty percent of “national pilot laboratories” are on
campuses, for example, as are 140 “national key laboratories,” 63
percent of the national total, Ms Lou pointed out. Chinese universities
also house 26 national engineering laboratories and 110 National
Engineering Research Centers. There are 76 national university science
parks with connections to more than 110 universities, she said. “We are
promoting science parks to become important test beds for our talent to
receive better training before they enter the work market,” Ms. Lou
explained.
Universities play a central role in national innovation tasks, Ms. Lou
said. Universities are in charge of around 80 percent of research under
the National Science Foundation’s general programs, for example,
including the major of “key” and “major” programs. Universities also
run 40 percent of national high-technology research and development
programs and 30 percent of research programs dedicated to “tackling key
industrial problems of generic technology,” she noted.
Universities also are becoming more important sites for applied
technology. Ms. Lou noted that funding for converting research results
into practical business applications is growing by 20 percent annually,
and that approximately 40 percent of all university scientific research
funding now come from business.
In terms of research results, universities generate more than 35
percent of patents, 60 percent of papers published in Chinese-language
periodicals, and 80 percent of published papers in science and
engineering journals, Ms. Lou noted. Universities receive more than half
of all National Science and Technology Awards.
To develop China’s innovation system, the government is putting a
high emphasis on the continuity of scientific research, Ms. Lou said. It is
taking into account the fact that technological innovation is developing
exponentially and that emerging industries are becoming more
concentrated. The government also is focusing on the interaction
between science, technology, and policy.
Ms. Lou presented the following guiding principles of China’s
innovation strategy: To accurately position cultivation of talent and
scientific research that serves society, to take into account the different
advantages and characteristics of different universities so that they can
collaborate, to boost original innovation by providing support for core
technologies, and to combine, consolidate, and integrate activities to
more efficiently allocate resources. The country also needs a more
interdisciplinary approach to innovation, she said.
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70 BUILDING THE 21ST CENTURY: U.S.-CHINA COOPERATION
The government wants to better position Chinese universities, Ms.
Lou said. One of the top objectives for the next five years is to establish a
“schools-of-higher-education innovation system that fits in a socialist
market economy and technological development patterns,” she said.
Another is to “markedly raise competitiveness and the quality of schools
of higher education.”
Universities and the U.S. Innovation System
Charles Vest
National Academy of Engineering
Dr. Vest’s presentation focused on the fundamentals and key
historical points of the development of American universities and the
U.S. innovation system. Three years—1862, 1945, and 1980—were
pivotal turning points, he said.
In the midst of the American Civil War, Dr. Vest explained, the
federal government passed the Land Grant Act of 1862.3 This legislation
allotted a parcel of land to each state, the income from which was to be
used to establish public universities to teach agriculture and “mechanic
arts,” or engineering. “This was the beginning of a great system of public
universities that gave access to education and research-and-development
work to a vast number of young U.S. men and women,” he said.
The second major turning point came nearly a century later, in 1945.
Until then, Dr. Vest noted, private industry funded almost all R&D at
universities. The federal government was a “relatively small player,”
funding a modest amount of research in engineering, agriculture, and
medical schools. “World War II changed everything,” he said.
Science and engineering played a major role in the allied victory in
the war. As peacetime approached, President Franklin D. Roosevelt
wrote a letter to Vannevar Bush, a former engineering professor and
entrepreneur who had played a major role in Washington mobilizing
scientists, engineers, and industry for the war effort.4 President Roosevelt
3
The Morrill Act of 1862 (7 U.S.C. Sec. 301), also known as the Land-Grant
College Act, gave each state 30,000 acres of federal land to establish colleges.
4
Vannevar Bush (1880-1974) was director of the Office of Scientific Research
and Development during World War II and is regarded as the architect of post-
War U.S. science and technology policy. Dr. Bush maintained that the federal
government should invest in basic scientific research, but that converting
science into technology and commercial products was the role of private
industry.
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asked Mr. Bush how the scientific community could work in peacetime
to secure the nation’s economic vitality, health, and security.
Bush produced a famous report called Science: The Endless Frontier.5
It made four primary recommendations that “seem very simple today, but
were actually very radical in 1945,” Dr. Vest said.
The first recommendation was that the federal government should
view universities as the primary source of basic research in science,
engineering, and medicine. Bush believed the government “should not
start something new,” Dr. Vest explained. The concept was that the
government gets two things in return for each dollar spent on university
research: The results of that research and financial support for “educating
the next generation of scientists, engineers, and doctors,” he said.
The Bush report suggested that federal research grants be awarded
based on competitive merit. “It was to create what I would call a
marketplace of ideas,” Dr. Vest said. The report also recommended
establishing the National Science Foundation, “which in its current form
is one of the most important funders of basic research in U.S.
universities,” he said.
Under the system envisioned by Bush and his committee, federal
funding of scientific research contributed to economic development
through a “linear progression,” Dr. Vest explained. Basic research led to
applied research, which was followed by product development and then
the introduction of goods and services into the market. The vision is
dated, however. “Today’s world is more complicated,” he said.
Bush also believed in a laissez faire economic approach. “Support
basic research, and the marketplace would decide which ideas are
important and good. Private industry would move them toward products
and services,” he explained.
The third milestone in the development of the U.S. innovation system
was the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980,6 Dr. Vest said. This legislation allowed
universities to own the intellectual property resulting from federally
funded research in most cases. The U.S. government always gets free use
5
See Vannevar Bush, Science The Endless Frontier: A Report to the President,
Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945, Washington, DC:
United States Government Printing Office, 1945.
6
The Bayh Dole Act of 1980 (PL 96-517, Patent and Trademark Act
Amendments of 1980), or the University and Small Business Patent Procedures
Act, (PL 96-517, Patent and Trademark Act Amendments of 1980), gave
universities control over their inventions stemming from federally-funded
research.
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of such intellectual property. By allowing universities to license and
patent inventions, “this started a very different and increased relationship
of universities to the private sector,” Dr. Vest explained.
What does all this mean in practice? Dr. Vest stressed that the two
primary missions of both public and private universities in the United
States are education and research. “They have a third mission, which we
broadly define as service to society,” he said. “I think of all three of these
mean that universities create opportunity—opportunity for graduates,
opportunity for states and regions, opportunity for the world.” However,
“the role of service to society, particularly in economic development and
technology transfer, definitely comes third,” Dr. Vest stressed.
The so-called U.S. innovation system that evolved in this
environment “frankly is not really a system,” Dr. Vest said. “It is not
designed or planned very explicitly.” Nevertheless, the government,
universities, and industry work together, he explained. “They create new
knowledge and technology through research, educate young women and
men, and create the next generation of knowledge and technologies,” he
said. “The marketplace then plays the role of moving these new ideas
into the world as new products, processes and services.”
Historically, this process has been a very decentralized, very loosely
organized, and highly entrepreneurial system,” Dr. Vest said. “Therefore,
our innovation ecosystem has tended to vary from city to city and region
to region, but always with these three components.”
In balance, the U.S. system has been a great success, Dr. Vest said.
Some economists estimate that more than half of America’s economic
growth in the past 60 years has been due to technological innovation, he
noted, much of which came out of universities. Some of the most
important innovations that have come largely out of universities include
computing, the laser, the fundamentals of global positioning systems,
numerically controlled machines, the organization and deployment of the
World Wide Web, concepts of financial engineering, the genetic
revolution, and much of modern medicine.
These were “big, earth-shaking changes and innovation, all of which
had huge economic impact,” he said. “But none were explicitly planned
or envisioned in advance. So the role of fundamental research, freedom,
flexibility, and entrepreneurship plays out in often-unexpected but very
important ways.”
Two other ingredients must be added to make the U.S. innovation
system work, he said. The first is venture capital. “This risk-taking
entrepreneurial approach to funding new ideas and new people to try to
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create new products, processes, and services has played an enormously
important role, particularly in the last few decades,” Dr. Vest said.
Clusters of innovation also have been very important. Dr. Vest
explained that there essentially are two types of clusters—those that
evolve naturally and those that are planned. The two most famous
innovation clusters are Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128. Neither
was planned, he noted. “They came about because groups of bright
people around universities and industry came together,” he said. “The
idea of venture capital developed, and great success ensued.”
More recently, several planned and strategic innovation clusters have
been created, Dr. Vest explained. Research Triangle Park in North
Carolina is a good example. These clusters often began when large
companies were attracted to a park to conduct research and development.
These investments spawned smaller, more specialized companies in the
area, “usually with one or more universities engaged,” he said.
One feature of the U.S. innovation system is that every decade or so
there seems to be a change in the way innovation works, especially from
the perspective of large companies, Dr. Vest observed. In the 1970s, for
example, innovation was dominated by central corporate research labs
such as ATT’s Bell Labs.
In the 1980s, as the U.S. lost competitiveness in manufacturing, “big
companies reworked the way in which they did R&D and transformed it
into a new kind of product development,” Dr. Vest explained. In the
1990s, companies were performing better and were good at incremental
improvements but realized they were not coming up with enough new
ideas, he recalled. “So companies began purchasing their innovation by
acquiring small start-up companies, frequently coming out of
universities,” he said. In the first decade of the new millennium,
companies moved to the “open innovation” model, “which recognized,
among other things, the global nature of innovation,” he said.
What will be the new innovation system in the next decade? Dr. Vest
said he doesn’t have the answer, but had some observations. Life
sciences and information systems “clearly will play a driving role in
innovation in the next 20 or 30 years,” he said. Another observation is
that “we are going to be challenged in both of our countries to
understand how to adapt our innovation system to large-scale challenges
such as energy, climate change, food, and water.”
The future of venture capital also is unclear, Dr. Vest said. “It is
getting too risk-averse in the United States and is aggregating too much
in a small number of large venture-capital firms.” Another question is
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whether there will be a new disruptive technology to approach large
issues such as energy, he said.
The most important question, Dr. Vest said, is “whether there will be
a new enabling technology that will come along in the same way that
information technology came along in the last century to change
everything.” A final question: “What does the globalization of research
and development, of education, and a highly educated and innovative
workforce mean for all of us?” Dr. Vest said he would leave all of these
as questions for discussion.
Universities as Drivers of Growth in the
United States
C. D. Mote, Jr.
University of Maryland, College Park
The University of Maryland at College Park illustrates the role
American universities play in economic development, said Dr. Mote, the
school’s president and an engineering professor. He stressed, however,
that education and research remain the university’s primary missions.
To offer of a glimpse of the university’s economic impact, Dr. Mote
presented a few “factoids” that he said are “fairly typical” of U.S.
universities:
• For every dollar the University of Maryland at College Park spends
on faculty salaries, these faculty raise $3 in external research
funding.
• Every dollar the state spends on the university generates $8 in
economic activity.
• For every state dollar invested, the university raises $35 in
development resources for small Maryland businesses.
• Every dollar in state investment has generated $200 worth of goods
and services produced by university-supported companies over 25
years.
“You can see fairly quickly that the economic impact on the state by
major research universities is very high,” Dr. Mote said
It also is important to understand that American universities are
“independent and free to engage in research and economic activity
without permissions and without controls,” Dr. Mote said. “This is true
for private universities and for public universities too. For instance, a
president of a U.S. university can to go the Ministry of Science and
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Technology in China, meet with the minister, and arrange agreements
that do not violate U.S. law without permission from the board of the
university, or the governments of the state and the nation.” This
independence is a “fundamental contributor to the success of U.S.
universities,” he said.
A range of programs on the University of Maryland campus
exemplify how “the spirit of entrepreneurship is embedded into the
infrastructure of the university,” Dr. Mote said. For instance, the Hinman
CEOs program is a residence hall based program reserved for student
entrepreneurs who want to start companies. In an average year, 17
companies are spawned in the dorm.
The Hillman Program campus works with Prince George’s
Community College to nurture entrepreneurs who tend to be older, in
their 30s or even 40s, and have returned to college to help them to start
businesses. “They come through the community college and transfer to
the university to become entrepreneurs. They have ideas,” he said.
The ASPIRE program, by contrast, helps engineering students who
want to get jobs in private industry after graduating. ASPIRE, which is
run by the A. James Clark School of Engineering and the Maryland
Technology Enterprises Institute, gives students scholarships to work on
real-world, faculty-supervised engineering projects with companies. The
university’s Smith School of Business, meanwhile, offers a business plan
competition called Cupid’s Cup. Students compete for resources to
support starting their own companies by submitting business plans to
veteran entrepreneurs serving as judges.
The university also participates in the Solar Decathlon, a competition
administered by the U.S. Department of Energy. Twenty universities
from around the world are invited to build solar houses on the National
Mall in Washington, D. C. The University of Maryland team developed
its “Leaf House” that operated off the electricity grid for eight days,
including providing power for an electrical vehicle, “and had do a few
other things to make it a little more of a challenge,” Dr. Mote explained.
Companies launched through the University of Maryland include
Alertus, a developer of emergency-warning systems. Another is
Squarespace, a company that offers an environment for creating and
managing Web sites and blogs.
The university also offers services to the surrounding community. For
25 years the engineering school has run the Maryland Technologies
Enterprise Institute (MTECH) and the business school has operated the
Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship. The two programs work together
to create enterprises and offer services for new and existing companies.
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The university also runs the oldest small-business incubator in the
state and a “bioprocess scale-up facility.” The latter unit “takes bench-
top bioprocesses and turns them into commercial production-line
processes,” Dr. Mote explained. The state of Maryland funds both
facilities.
The university works with industry as well. Maryland Industrial
Partnerships is a program in which faculty are funded to work at
companies to help commercialize their products. “Essentially, it is a
state-subsidized consulting arrangement that has been extraordinarily
successful and is being replicated around the United States,” he said.
Plus, there is a “venture accelerator,” an organization that helps students
and faculty speed up development of commercial products and
companies. They receive training, introductions to financial backers, and
mentoring.
The university also runs a “technology start-up boot camp.” This is a
weekend camp for people who want to start companies. Typically, these
“boot camps” draw 500 to 600 participants from outside the university,
Dr. Mote said. They teach “the good news and bad news of starting
companies,” including how to raise resources, why companies go
bankrupt, and surviving the Valley of Death.
To help develop a pool of start-up capital, the university’s business
school has organized an “angel network.” Angels provide early-stage
funding, before good ideas achieve venture support. “It is a way for the
business school to connect aspiring entrepreneurs with angels,” he
explained. And there is a business counseling program called Pitch
Dingman, where the Dingman Center hosts a two-hour session where
anyone can come, present ideas for new ventures, and receive feedback
from experts who will then introduce them to angel investors if their
ideas pass muster.
Dr. Mote estimated that all of these services and activities have
generated $20 billion in economic activity over the past quarter century
at a total cost to the state of approximately $88 million.
The university has launched or assisted a wide range of businesses.
For instance, MTECH has helped develop commercial products with
companies as diverse as toolmaker Black & Decker, the Quantum Sail
Design Group, Hughes Network Systems, and engineering services firm
Navmar.
Companies that have emerged from the university’s incubator include
two billion dollar companies: molecular diagnostic company Digene
Corp.; Martek Biosciences Corp., a developer of nutritional products;
plus the life sciences research firm NovaScreen Biosciences Corp. “They
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went through the incubator right at the beginning and used all of the
services I described,” Dr. Mote said.
The M Square Research Park, which is next to the university campus
has received $5 million in state funding and $500 million in private
investment, and will have about 2 million square feet of space and 6,000
jobs when built out.
In terms of the national domain, the University of Maryland interacts
with federal laboratories, such as those owned by the Department of
Energy. Its proximity to Washington, DC, also means the university is
involved in a range of federal research initiatives and missions. Dr. Mote
said the school gets around $500 million in federal research funding a
year. Federal partners include the National Institutes of Health, the
Smithsonian Institution, the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration, and the National Security Agency. In some cases the
university helps with government missions. Other times, the government
supports university missions. “In other cases we work together on
somebody else’s mission,” Dr. Mote said.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is establishing
a national center for global climate-change and weather-predication in
the university research park. The DoE’s Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory, NASA, and the university’s Earth System Science
Interdisciplinary Center also are involved. Graduate and undergraduate
students work in the center, which includes experts in geography, public
policy, geology, and atmospheric and ocean sciences. Dr. Mote noted
that the climate-change center also has worked with the Chinese
Academy of Sciences and recently sent a team of 10 researchers to
China.
Yet another federal partnership is with the National Institute of
Science and Technology and is devoted to quantum physics. The agency
is contributing some construction funds for a new physical sciences
building on campus, and NIST scientists will work at the center. The
campus also is home to an Energy Frontier Center and Physics Frontier
Center. “These are ways in which the Department of Energy, National
Science Foundation, and the university come together on research
initiatives that are going to have great impact,” Dr. Mote explained.
The university is also is engaged in a range of global activities. It has
an “international incubator,” for example, that has helped develop
companies from Canada, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, Russia, and
other nations. There also is an “international research park,” which is
only available to international companies “to come and establish a
foothold in the state of Maryland,” Dr. Mote explained. The state
contributes funding for the park.
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The school has extensive relationships with China. There is the
Institute for Global Chinese Affairs, for example, which trains Chinese
executives. The first executives from China to visit the United States
after the Cultural Revolution, a group from Suzhou, attended programs at
the institute, Dr. Mote said. Some 3,000 Chinese executives have
participated in the training programs, which last from two months to one
year, he said.
The university’s Executive Master’s in Public Administration
program, meanwhile, gives one-year degrees in public management to
Chinese executives. The program was arranged with Secretary Liang
Baohua of Jiangsu Province, and has trained 160 executives in five
groups at Maryland’s School of Public Policy. The executives finish their
degrees after three months of additional study in China.
The university is home to a Confucius Institute, a Chinese program
teaching and promulgating understanding of Chinese language and
culture. The University of Maryland served as the pilot for the program
in 2004, making it the oldest Confucius Institute in the world. There now
are now 240 Confucius Institutes in 96 countries, including 74 in the
United States. “It is a soft power, good feeling program, where each
institute is free to set its own independent agenda and operation,” he said.
Eleven Chinese companies have set up operations at the university’s
international incubator, Dr. Mote noted. Glodon Co., a developer of
software for the construction industry, has been particularly successful.
Formerly known as Beijing Grandsoft, the company went public, raising
$2 billion. Within six months it was valued at $20 billion, he said.
Other Chinese companies in the incubator have included Wuxi
TocaTek, DaSol Solar Energy Science and Technology, and Dimetek.
Shandong Province set up a liaison office at the incubator. “The
university has a role to play in facilitating this interchange,” he said. “It
shows what universities can do on an international scale to build
enterprises.”
In 2002, the Chinese government and Maryland set up a joint research
park near the campus. When the park opened, Chinese Minister of
Science and Technology Wan Gang travelled to the campus to attend the
ribbon-cutting ceremony. Many Chinese companies with operations in
the park were recruited through a series of meetings in Beijing,
Shanghai, and Guangzhou, Dr. Mote said.
The University of Maryland has many other foreign partnerships, Dr.
Mote noted. In Sierra Leone, for example, the university is involved in a
health initiative. A Maryland graduate who now is a professional football
player donated $2 million to set up a center to facilitate work.
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To conclude, Dr. Mote noted that innovation has become a growing
theme around the world. He cited Chinese President Hu Jintao, who in
2007 said that “the worldwide competition of overall national strength is
actually a competition for talents, especially for innovative talents.”7
The key to succeeding in innovation is leadership, Dr. Mote said.
“Every innovative environment needs an innovation leader. Without a
leader, and the ability to innovate within the infrastructure of an
organization, it can never work. Leadership is everything.”
U.S. Initiatives for Building Innovation Clusters
Ginger Lew
National Economic Council
The Obama Administration launched its regional innovation cluster
initiative in the past year, explained Ms. Lew, a senior counselor to the
White House and Small Business Administration on small-business
issues. She acknowledged that the cluster concept itself is not new. “In
Europe and Asia, regional innovation clusters developed with more of a
top down process driven by government entities,” she said. “The
development of regional innovation clusters here in the United States has
been much more on an ad-hoc, organic basis.”8
Ms. Lew described cluster initiatives as consortia in which city and
state governments and business, community, and educational leaders
“come together to engage in smart economic growth strategies for a
region.” In the United States, she said, the process begins when a region
assesses its local assets such as industry strengths, workforce skills,
university research, and align those interests with future goals of key
stakeholders.
One of the primary reasons for focusing on clusters as tools for
economic planning and spurring innovation “is that businesses are no
longer looking to locate in just one city,” Ms. Lew said. “Rather,
businesses are looking for the talent, infrastructure, and research
capabilities that may be concentrated in a region that allows them to
access what we call a more vibrant supply chain of vendors, services, and
workforce.” Another factor is that employees in the United States “no
7
See October 2007 speech by Hu Jintao to the 17th CPC National Congress.
8
For further explanation of U.S. innovation cluster policy, see presentation by
Ginger Lew in upcoming book, Charles W. Wessner, Clustering for 21st
Century Prosperity, Washington, DC: The National Academies Press,
forthcoming.
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80 BUILDING THE 21ST CENTURY: U.S.-CHINA COOPERATION
longer work within defined boundaries,” she added. “We are mobile.
Sometimes we work virtually. And we certainly work across city lines
and county lines.”
A number of communities across the United States have undertaken
efforts to develop innovation clusters, Ms. Lew explained. One major
reason is that “economic studies have shown that clusters lead to higher
paying jobs, more innovation, and more robust regional economies,” she
said.
Austin, Texas, which has focused on attracting a robust
semiconductor industry, is the hub of one such regional cluster, Ms. Lew
noted. Kansas has developed a strong regional aviation industry. Other
communities have leveraged historical strengths to build new clusters.
Ms. Lew cited Corning, New York, which parlayed its historical strength
in glass into a fiber-optics industry. Seattle took advantage of its strong
university system to develop a thriving bio-sciences cluster.
To illustrate the diversity of U.S. regional clusters, Ms. Lew
displayed a map of the country by Harvard Business School’s Institute
for Strategy and Competitiveness.9 The clusters on the map included oil
and gas in Wichita, Kansas, entertainment in Los Angeles, and processed
foods in Chicago. “When we talk about innovation, we oftentimes think
about high-tech, such as nano-science, fiber optics, or whatever,” she
said. “But when you look at the map, you can see that you can have
regional cluster activities in a broad range of industries.”
The success of Kansas in commercial aviation is a good case study,
Ms. Lew said. This industry employs 17.8 percent of all Kansas
manufacturing employees and contributes 26 percent of manufacturing
wages. What’s more, the average annual wage of workers in the aviation
cluster is $63,000—more than 50 percent above the average industrial
wage in the United States. Between 2004 and 2014; the aviation industry
is expected to create 4,450 net new jobs in the state.10 “More importantly,
it has increased the education level of the workforce,” Ms. Lew said. “A
number of the jobs now require a bachelor’s degree and even a master’s
degree.”
9
The Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness, led by Michael Porter at
Harvard Business School, has a project to map industrial clusters around the
world. See
.
10
See Center for Economic Development and Business Research, “Kansas
Aviation Manufacturing,” W. Frank Barton School of Business, Wichita State
University, September 2008.
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The Obama Administration is interested in innovation clusters
because “we really see them as a way to encourage regional entities to
collaborate to create new businesses and jobs,” Ms. Lew said. “It also is
a way to leverage federal programs.” The United States has many federal
bureaus and agencies that work in their own “silos,” she explained. “But
we are finding that activities across many agencies can be very
complimentary.”
One example of overlapping interests by federal agencies is clean
energy. The Environmental Protection Agency has programs in clean
water, for instance, that can be critical to efforts to develop alternative
energy industries is certain regions. The EPA, DoE, and other agencies
can work together. “This idea of leveraging federal dollars to be more
impactful is a critical outcome we are seeking with regional innovation
clusters,” she said. “We are seeking what we call a multiplier effect.”11
Unlike many regional cluster strategies in Europe, the U.S. model is
very “bottoms up,” Ms. Lew said. “We are looking to promote activity at
the core regional level.” Agencies in Washington, therefore, work with
states that have comprehensive development plans. “We are looking for
holistic, integrated solutions to building regional economies,” she said.
Programs the Obama Administration has launched over the past year
to promote regional clusters include:
• Energy Regional Innovation Clusters (ERIC): Led by the DoE,
federal agencies such as the Small Business Administration, the
Department of Education, the National Science Foundation, and the
Department of Labor are contributing funds and working with
regional partners to develop innovation clusters in clean energy.12
• Competitive Grants: The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for
instance, has launched a program to award planning grants to 12
regional bodies. The grants aim to “encourage rural communities to
11
For elaboration on the philosophy of federal coordination on clusters, see
Jonathan Sallet, Ed Paisley, Justing Masterman, “The Geography of
Innovation,” Center for American Progress, 2009. Also see Karen G. Mills,
Elisabeth B. Reynolds, and Andrew Reamer, “Clusters and Competitiveness: A
New Federal Role for Stimulating Regional Economies,” Metropolitan Policy
Program at Brookings, April 2008.
12
The first Energy Regional Innovation Cluster is to focus on clean-energy
technologies used in buildings. For details, see the Funding Opportunity
Announcement for Fiscal Year 2010 on the DoE Web site. See
.
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82 BUILDING THE 21ST CENTURY: U.S.-CHINA COOPERATION
find new ways to draw on their core industries to attract more value-
added business opportunities,” Ms. Lew explained.
• Small Business Loans: The Small Business Administration will
announce a competition to support ten regional initiatives across the
United States to commercialize new technology.
• i-6 Challenge Grants. The Department of Commerce in May said it
will award $12 million in grants administered by the Economic
Development Agency to six teams across the United States with “the
most innovative ideas to drive technology commercialization and
entrepreneurship. The NIST also will contribute funds.13
• 2011 Federal Budget: President Obama’s budget for Fiscal Year
2011 includes more than $300 million in new funding for agencies
such as the Department of Labor, the SBA, and the Economic
Development Agency to assist regional innovation cluster
initiatives.14
• America COMPETES Act: The most recent version of legislation
to boost America’s competitiveness in science and technology
includes provisions for promoting regional innovation clusters.15
Ms. Lew outlined the structure of typical regional innovation clusters.
At the core, she said, is the industry that a region or community
identifies. Around that industry are suppliers, customers, and support
industries. The rest of the ecosystem includes universities, community
colleges, technical schools, federal agencies, labor groups, and non-
government organizations, she explained.
In summary, the regional innovation cluster strategy of the Obama
Administration has three core principles, Ms. Lew said. One is to
13
See Announcement of Federal Funding Opportunity for i6 program at
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“encourage extensive collaboration at the regional level with business,
university, and community leaders in public-private partnerships.” The
second core principle is to “encourage the collaboration and coordination
of federal dollars.” The third is to “cultivate an ecosystem to support the
type of innovative, entrepreneurial clusters that will lead to new
industries, new technologies, and new ways of doing things,” she said.
Every county has its own approach to support innovation, Ms. Lew
observed. The Chinese government supports the university systems. “The
achievements (China) has achieved in a very short time are amazing,”
she said. The U.S. approach is more bottom-up with strong involvement
from universities and some involvement at the federal level. “I think we
can learn from both approaches,” she said.
At the end of the day, however, “innovation resides in the mind of
creative, smart individuals,” Ms. Lew said. “They have to have the tools
and skills. And they have to have the ecosystem to support that. But it
only takes the curiosity of one person to come up with the next Baidu.
That one person can launch a new industry.”
As one small example of how individual curiosity drives innovation,
Ms. Lew recalled her grandfather, who grew up in a small village in
China. When he was young, her grandfather’s job was to herd the
family’s ducks with a long bamboo pole. One of his favorite ducks
sometimes strayed from the flock, and her grandfather had to find it.
After straying several more times, the duck found a new source of food.
So her grandfather allowed the duck to continue exploring to satisfy its
curiosity. “Not only did it find additional new sources of food, but new
sources of water as well,” Ms. Lew recalled.
The responsibility of the federal government, university presidents, or
the National Academy of Science “is to provide the type of support,
skills and ecosystem that allows individuals to thrive.”
Discussion
Moderator Carl Dahlman asked for further elaboration on several
points made in presentations by the panelists. One is “the differences
between the Chinese system, which is more top-down, and the American
system, which is more bottom-up,” he said. Another point is the
“tremendous importance of having open systems.” He asked Lou Jing
and Charles Vest to comment on lessons that can be learned from each
others’ systems.
Dr. Dahlman also observed that toward the end of his presentation,
Dr. Vest suggested the U.S. system may be a little dated given the new
competition. He asked him to explain. Finally, Dr. Dahlman noted that
84 BUILDING THE 21ST CENTURY: U.S.-CHINA COOPERATION
“we are now in a system where we have much more global education,
research and development, and flows of people.” He asked how countries
can adapt their innovation systems to this reality and how the United
States and China can collaborate in new areas.
Ms. Lou disagreed that China’s approach to innovation clusters is so
top-down. “We have a number of nationally funded projects,” she
acknowledged. “These projects have played an important role in creating
a platform at the national level.”
But other models also exist, she said. Universities very actively
support regional innovation clusters. “It is important to combine all
participants in these regions,” she said. “We also have a more horizontal
development model. We have down to up as well as up to down.”
Many places in China act as core centers to promote innovation in
surrounding areas, she said. Examples are the Zhongguancun and Shandi
districts in Beijing, the high-tech development zone in Shanghai, and the
science and technology parks and research centers at universities and in
provinces around the country.
Before responding to the question, Dr. Vest quipped that he had to
apologize to Ginger Lew for his fondness of Peking duck. “I hope that by
partaking, I don’t stomp out some of the innovation in China,” he said.
Dr. Vest said he also agreed with Ms. Lew that innovation, clusters, job
creation, and economic development “are not all about high tech.”
Regarding cluster-development models, Dr. Vest said he is “a great
believer in bottom up and open systems, by which I mean globally and
regionally—not just nationally.” He said he believes that “the most
fundamental, true innovation is still going to come out of unexpected
places and unexpected programs of basic research, not through
planning.”
Nevertheless, Dr. Vest predicted that this decade will be “one of re-
balancing.” The ideas of competition and cooperation on a global scale
will be re-balanced, he predicted. “It also will be one of re-balancing the
purpose of innovation and the nature of economic development.”
Several fundamental issues will drive this change, Dr. Vest predicted.
The “grand challenges” of the next century include energy, climate
change, a global population that is approaching 9 billion people, and the
rapid economic development of nations such as China. “These larger-
scale issues that we simply have to resolve are going to affect the way
that innovation works,” he said.
An example of this shift in outlook is the strategy outlined by Energy
Under Secretary Kristina Johnson for developing energy-innovation
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hubs. “This is a little more of a planned approach,” Dr. Vest said. “It is a
little more top-down, to define the problems we have to solve.”
Universities’ approach to basic research also will continue to change.
“Universities should remain focused on discovery of new scientific
knowledge, new technologies, and new processes,” Dr. Vest said. “But I
think they are going to be increasingly use-inspired.” Work at the
interface of life sciences and engineering for medical applications and
new ways of producing materials is evidence of the new focus. “People
are simultaneously exploring the unknown, but with a broad end-goal in
mind,” he said.
There are other signs of change in innovation systems, Dr. Vest said.
For example, several “very interesting” new universities are being started
around the world. One is Olin College near Boston. Others are Aalto
University outside Helsinki and the new Singapore University of
Technology and Design. “What they all have in common is an attempt to
blend engineering and design in a very broad sense, running all the way
from art and architecture to industrial design, with a good dose of
economics,” he said. “They all are searching for something new. I think
they will be creating new kinds of people.”
There also are new policy tools. In addition to the challenge grants
Ginger Lew mentioned, there are U.S. inducement prizes such as those
offered by the X Prize Foundation.16 “Google the X Prize Foundation
and you’ll find some really interesting ways of driving innovation that
are new and goal-oriented,” Dr. Vest said.
In general, “we are moving into an era of what I would call brain
integration,” Dr. Vest said. “Somehow, in the coming decades, people all
around the world, connected by huge computing and communication
power, will start innovating collectively in ways we cannot predict. But I
think this is why we have to maintain, in the near term, good people-to-
people contact. It also is why I very much believe in openness of systems
and science and engineering communication. Something new and
exciting will come out of that, but I don’t know just what it is.”
Dr. Mote of the University of Maryland said he thinks leadership is
one of the most important keys to innovation, even more important than
the research topic itself. “In virtually every instance of successful
innovation, you will find leadership in terms of inspiration, ideas, and in
16
The X Prize Foundation is a non-profit educational organization whose
mission is to “bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity.” It
awards industry-sponsored prizes for innovators working on everything from
genomics and automobiles to new spacecraft.
86 BUILDING THE 21ST CENTURY: U.S.-CHINA COOPERATION
being able to mobilize focus on a topic,” he said. “With the right
leadership you can make marvelous things happen.”
If one accepts that position, “you can structure innovation in the
world in six layers,” Dr. Mote said. The first layer is the individual. “An
individual has to have innovative personality, focus, and capability,” he
said. The second layer is organizational—a company, university, or “just
two or three people who come together and have an innovative idea.”
Sergei Brin and Larry Page, who started Google in 1998, are examples.
“They didn’t have a company, just two innovative individuals,” he said.
The third level is regional—collections of organizations and
individuals “that may not even have a specific focus,” Dr. Mote said. The
next is the state or provincial level. There needs to be leadership at the
governmental level “that has the same level of authority and, possibly,
inspiration.” The fifth level is national. Leadership typically comes from
the president or the presidential equivalents.
Finally, there is the global level. When one goes down the list of great
international challenges—such as climate change, water, terrorism, and
oceans—“all involve innovation on a global platform,” Dr. Mote said.
“That requires leadership on a global scale.” The United States, however,
is not well positioned to participate at this level. “We are very much
bottom-up,” he said. “We begin to run out of steam once we get to the
regional level.”
Efforts by the departments of Energy and Commerce to facilitate
innovation clusters are “a marvelously good, important step,” Dr. Mote
said. This kind of federal collaboration hasn’t occurred in the United
States since before 1945, he noted. “At some point, the national piece
will have to come into play so that we can take on these challenges.
Otherwise, it cannot happen, because these things must be done through
intergovernmental relationships.”
Dr. Mote noted that nations with top-down innovation environments,
such as China, Singapore, and Russia, “are all trying to work their way to
the bottom, while the United States is trying to work its way to the top. I
think the collaborations between us will help us get there, because I think
the whole spectrum has to be covered for us to take on these big
challenges.”
