America’s Continuing Failure to Innovate

The very first blog post of my career was at Denise Caruso’s Hybrid Vigor that I called The Intangible Imperitive.  The post was inspired by an article about how Brazil’s farmers were out-innovating those in the U.S. I felt frustrated that we were not stepping up to global competition. Since then, I have blogged about similar concerns for the automotive industry. I had the same feeling when I read a story yesterday in the New York Times entitled China Far Outpaces U.S. in Cleaner Coal-Fired Plants:

By adopting “ultra-supercritical” technology, which uses extremely hot steam to achieve the highest efficiency, and by building many identical power plants at the same time, China has cut costs dramatically through economies of scale. It now can cost a third less to build an ultra-supercritical power plant in China than to build a less efficient coal-fired plant in the United States.

I am not motivated by nationalism. It’s not that the U.S. needs to be number one in everything. Yet, we are squandering our national intellectual capital by failing to apply it to the challenges of our time. We are not innovating at the pace we could, that we need to. It hurts our country but I think that it hurts our global community. We have a lot to add to global development and we are not living up to our potential.