America's Competitive Edge

Dr. Nat: There is concern about the U.S. losing its competitive edge in innovation is a concern warranted by facts and if so what can be done to remedy the situation and regarding this role what do you see for institutions like Tennessee Tech?

Dr. Atkins: I know there’s a wealth of information beginning to bubble up within the government and within academia, think tanks and etc. about the innovation or loss of innovation. Not necessarily loss but rate of innovation relative to the rate of innovation in other countries. There was a Harvard business article that came out about a looming crisis within the U.S. were the author established a innovation index or a creativity index which was based upon the number of published articles, the number of patents, new patents per year and the amount of R& D funds relative to gross national product that was being spent and he put together a creativity index and based on that he ranked various countries. Out of about seventy countries the United States came in about seventeenth and for the first year back in 2004 and 2005 we were no longer the number one publisher of technical referee journals technical articles, we became number three or fourth depending on 2004 and 2005. There are many indicators that say we are slipping a little bit. One of the contributors might be the number of engineering practicing researchers that are coming about in the various countries today. As I’ve said in some talks the United States have a capability of about 65,000 engineers a year. Japan, size of California, geographically and close to population wise turns out about 120,000 per year. India is know about to turn over 300,000 a year. China will turn out about 650,000 this year. So know you are looking at 1.1 million verses 65,000. Sheer numbers and having people thinking about similar problems will these lots of idea criteria that Linus Palling came up with will or has a tendency to start shifting this balance of measurements that indicate a creativity posture. Now are there simple solutions, it’s not clear. I know its something that’s being debated quite heavily within many agencies of the government and their having different academia look at the problem. Think about it. Something that Tech might do, I think, is create product students that have the ability to think innovative. To have innovation as one of their learned disciplined processes. To understand and want to make creative products to do that. I talked to the engineering students and ask them, “Well, how many patents have you applied for?” and you get this blank look from them. “Well I’ve not created any.” “Well have you created any intellectual property, have you thought about?” “Oh yeah I’ve thought about stuff but I never thought about doing that. So changing their mind set, changing their reward system, changing how people work together as a team and train them more so when they go out to the university they can hit the street running and their much more efficient at coming to solutions. Working joint programs between engineering and business schools to generate innovation concepts in innovation thoughts and just raising the awareness will raise the output. So I believe that is one thing tech can do. Tech produces outstanding students, they produce outstanding engineers, outstanding business people. We just need to raise their awareness that when a problem exists step back and let those creative minds of theirs enter into the solution problem.