The Global Struggle for Innovation — and how the U.S. can adjust to win
Alarming projections from the defense and intelligence communities show that the U.S. is falling behind on innovation at a great risk to our national security. Professors are being arrested in the U.S. for alleged participation in foreign talent programs and cybersecurity breaches are rife in both the government and private industry, as most recently shown in the SolarWinds hack. Beyond the splashy headlines, however, the crucial reason that the U.S. is losing the global competition for innovation is not due to nefarious international entities. Instead, the government’s failure to competitively fund research is the number one reason that the country is losing its crucial innovation edge, and current knee-jerk attempts to curtail international collaboration are counterproductive. Attempts to stifle collaboration with foreign partners are shortsighted and push crucial global talent out of the U.S. and into the research facilities of international competitors. Restrictions on foreign national participation in research also runs counter to key values of freedom and openness in research, not to mention that they potentially represent violations of federal equal opportunity laws. If the government wants to reverse this decline, new tactics are required.
Forced tech transfers from joint ventures, industrial espionage and cyberattacks have struck against U.S. business and national security interests. Beyond the concerns of cybersecurity failures, however, the reality is that U.S. lead in published research in science and technology has dwindled rapidly as competitor countries such as China continue to improve their technical capabilities and academic research output. This competition for innovation and talent is open and public and the trends indicate that the U.S. is quickly losing crucial technological advantages.
Innovation theft and talent enticement on the upswing, but…
Industrial espionage is nothing new — it has been a documented risk of doing business for hundreds of years and includes such highlights as the British East India Company stealing tea seeds out of China in the 1800s. Allies also do it to each other in modern times — France and the U.S. exchanged claims of industrial espionage for decades over the Airbus-Boeing competition. What has changed is the speed and breadth of virtual attacks, which have increased dramatically in the last twenty years as more personal information and proprietary data was moved to vulnerable cyber systems.
The trade wars and increasingly belligerent tone under the Trump administration towards competitive countries helped to bring these concerns to the forefront. As part of what some commentators have dubbed the ‘shadow war’ between the U.S. and Russia and China, cyberattacks are intended to not only steal innovation but to harass the U.S. government at a level below what they believe would trigger an armed reprisal from the U.S. and its allies. The two countries established an informal alliance to counter American global interests, and over 50% of the cyberattacks targeting the U.S. originate in China or Russia, where both countries have established hacker groups that operate on behalf of government interests. Additionally, a number of countries have come at the issue of intellectual property (IP) acquisition through more overt means, such as ‘foreign talent’ recruitment programs, such as China’s Thousand Talents Plan, but other countries actively work to coax information out of researchers at academic and government programs to advance their technological capabilities.
The federal government response may hurt innovation more than help
The U.S. has a national security interest in protecting IP and innovation developed in this country to protect it from exploitation from other global competitors. Thus, it is not a surprise that a response to these threats to the crucial edge in innovation is to pull up the drawbridge and wall off American technology and research from competitors. This defensive approach appeals to those who look at innovation as a zero-sum game, where the country with the largest piece of the existing technology wins. However, attempts to cut off access arguably have the opposite effect as intended as it stifles information exchange and growth in the industries and sectors where innovation is most desired.
A more nuanced approach is required to allow U.S. innovation to flourish while protecting crucial elements from exploitation or theft. Competitor nations have been keenly aware of the ‘innovation triangle’ in which the U.S. government, academia and private industry work together to move technology forward in support of national priorities. This model has set the stage to support everything from the space shuttle program to Google and has been the envy of the rest of the world. For decades, however, the model has been under siege as government funding for research has been dying the death of a thousand cuts. As the American Association for the Advancement of Science noted this year, federal support for research has been essentially flat for almost two decades (and declining precipitously as a percentage of GDP), while other nations are ramping up their support. In the last two decades, for example, Chinese government support for research has doubled.
Arguments that we are losing our research edge due to IP theft and some inherent weakness in the existing, open model of information sharing are missing that key point. The largest single reason that the United States is falling off its world-leading pace is because the federal government has failed to prioritize funding in support of research. Yes, IP theft is a threat to national security, but it is important to recognize that this issue is only a small piece of the innovation enterprise and the damage that has been done to U.S. innovation capabilities by underfunding research is far greater in the long run.
How to win the global struggle for innovation
Faced with external threats such as cyberattacks, state-supported industrial espionage and foreign talent recruitment programs, it may seem understandable that the U.S. government’s first reaction is to attempt to throw up restrictive walls to prevent the further erosion of America’s lead in innovation. Nevertheless, impulses to restrict international collaboration or cast a suspicious eye at foreign-born researchers will have a chilling effect on America’s research and innovation enterprise. Instead of focusing efforts on limiting international cooperation, the government should double-down on fostering increased research collaboration to encourage new ideas and breakthroughs. Yes, there is competition out there, but it is crucial to have some faith in the resilience and innovation capabilities that have been created and nurtured for decades through the existing innovation triangle model.
The government does need to aggressively change its approach to support (and defend) innovation, but in a different way than what has been seen recently. Instead of a prosecutorial orientation, where research partners are treated as potential leaks, the government needs to put resources into three areas to bolster the existing national research enterprise. First, the government must put more funding into the research enterprise. As part of this, it needs to include financial support and incentives to help government research partners, especially non-profits such as universities, to improve their cybersecurity capabilities. Second, the government needs to create an ombudsman and amnesty program to support greater discussion between the partners as to potential foreign influence or espionage. Finally, the U.S. government needs to ramp up opportunities for researchers to collaborate with preferred national partners for more sensitive technologies, similar to the Five Eyes program or NATO alliance, which would increase research opportunities with countries that have a reliable security system and respect for the rule of law.
The first prong of this approach — increasing federal support to basic research — is likely to have the greatest impact in improving the United States’ ability to successfully compete on innovation. Rather than playing whack-a-mole with concerns over leaks and foreign contacts, the federal government can concentrate on accelerating new innovation. The national economy will need stimulus on many fronts to recover from the fiscal damage of the pandemic, and funding research is arguably one of the best ways to foster growth and new breakthroughs that would spark the economy.
Nevertheless, some adjustments to the model in the face of external threats are necessary. Part of the government funding should be directed to help partners in the research community to improve their cyber capabilities and internal security for sensitive projects. The U.S. has mandated increased cybersecurity for research partners, and universities have actually done fairly well in complying with the requirements, but will be facing fiscal hurdles in the years ahead which will hamper their ability to invest in IT infrastructure in the wake of pandemic-related losses. A grant program to support cybersecurity at academic institutions would be invaluable to both the institutions and the government as it would help to secure key innovation during the crucial developmental stages.
If foreign talent recruitment programs are a threat, why not compete with them directly? U.S. academic institutions may be magnets for global talent but bolstering their ability to bring in the world’s finest minds through increased government funding (multi-year innovation awards, sponsored visiting professorships through visa programs, even an injection of funds into existing programs like Fulbright) would do much to undermine the lure of foreign talent recruitment programs.
The second prong of this process would be to establish an ombudsman to encourage discussions and answer questions over collaboration with foreign research partners. If the first call over a potential research concern comes from the FBI, it does little to encourage sharing and information exchanges between the government and research partners. It may also curtail viable and important research collaboration as faculty members and universities are uncertain how to apply the rules pertaining to international cooperation — to the detriment of American national security. There are currently around 150 ombudsman offices in the federal government performing invaluable services in resolving problems between agencies and their ‘customers.’ They facilitate information exchange and help resolve problems at the lowest possible level. Having an international research collaboration ombudsman to promote open discussion and confidentially answer concerns regarding foreign influence or entities would encourage early contact on these issues. It would be much more effective in establishing trust and cooperation between the government and research partners than contact from criminal investigators. Bolstering the ombudsman’s authority with a type of limited amnesty for partners that identify and declare potentially problematic foreign contacts would help to clear the slate of historical problems quickly and encourage future compliance and reporting.
Finally, in support of the concerns that are laid out in the National Defense Strategy and legislation such as the Protecting American Intellectual Property Act, the federal government can help to encourage research with preferred partners that are considered allies and partners, or who represent a reduced intellectual property theft risk due to their adherence to the rule of law. If you compare how potential national partners stack up for their adherence to the rule of law according to the World Justice Project, the countries that have the best rankings are overwhelmingly also our defense and security partners through NATO (representing eleven of the top twenty countries) or other alliances. China, by comparison, comes in at 88th on that list. By establishing greater funding opportunities and prizes for collaboration with researchers in these preferred partner countries, the U.S. can undermine the goals of ‘talent programs’ in countries such as China or Russia. Using these types of incentives to pull research into the friendlier arena of trusted partners is more (cost) effective and beneficial in the long-term than relying on threats of criminal repercussions for researchers and their home institutions.
These three adjustments to the federal research effort will enhance national security by sharpening U.S. innovation, increasing security at key non-governmental partner institutions and flow research projects and collaboration to preferred international partners who represent a minimal security risk. It will encourage closer communications between the federal government and research institutions, which should improve the ability of government agencies to detect potential problems quickly and effectively and work in tandem with research institutions to resolve them at the lowest possible level. It will support continued engagement with key foreign partners and help to tamp down the whiff of xenophobia that accompanies recent attempts to restrict foreign researchers and will instead encourage greater engagement with the world’s greatest minds and research talent. As with any global conflict, the U.S. is most successful when collaborating with allies, and research is no exception. The country’s national defense interests are firmly tied to more openness and collaboration in research, not in closing the door to our partners.
Kirk Samson works at Northwestern University and is a former diplomat and international law attorney for the Department of Defense.
