Outsourcing Science Could Pay Big Dividends For the U.S. Economy

Are the growing ranks of well-educated and increasingly well-financed scientists in other countries bad for U.S competitiveness and ultimately the economy? Not necessarily, argues Christopher T. Hill, professor of public policy and technology at George Mason University. In fact, he believes both could help keep U.S. innovation chugging along in what he describes as a “post-scientific society”—a place where U.S. innovators take advantage of scientific knowledge created at home and abroad to produce new markets, goods, and profits.

Dr. Hill’s ideas recently appeared in a New York Times piece describing new opportunities for U.S. corporations to tap into the burgeoning corps of scientists around the world who are conducting quality research, but may lack the resources to commercialize their work. Companies such as the hard drive manufacturer Seagate already recognize the potential of such an approach. The New York Times reports how the company was able to harness the Nobel prizing-winning work of two European physicists to develop and commercialize new hard drives.

So what will drive innovation in Dr. Hill’s post-scientific society? He explains in the pages of the National Academies journal Issues in Science and Technology:

A post-scientific society will have several key characteristics, the most important of which is that innovation leading to wealth generation and productivity growth will be based principally not on world leadership in fundamental research in the natural sciences and engineering, but on world-leading mastery of the creative powers of, and the basic sciences of, individual human beings, their societies, and their cultures.

He believes most firms will cut back on commitments to long-term research and will choose to “outsource” research to countries where good science can be done on the cheap. He envisions a future where successful companies will integrate knowledge over a wide variety of disciplines rather than committing to specialization. Such an economic landscape, he argues, would require policy makers and business leaders to revisit the current national innovation structure, a system which has largely been in place since World War II.

Tags: Innovation

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