“For the past three decades, funding for science research has slipped, the education system has continued to decline, and immigration policy has become less and less rational. Tax and regulatory policies have been made with more thought to domestic special interests than America’s long-term competition,” writes Fareed Zakaria.

Zakaria acknowledges that the U.S. has long been the global leader in innovation in “Is America Losing Its Mojo?” (Newsweek, November 14, 2009). But it’s losing its lead. According to the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, “in recent years, the United States has made the least progress of the 39 countries analyzed in improving its innovation capacity and internal competitiveness.”

What does this mean from a Baldrige perspective?

For businesses, it means establishing processes to detect the innovative products, services, and systems being developed by competitors worldwide. Zakaria gives examples, such as a fourfold increase in global pharmaceutical patent applications since 1995 and the dominance of foreign manufacturers in solar, wind, and battery production. It also means managing for innovation, a Baldrige core value that seeks new dimensions of performance.

For education, it means fixing a system that, as I noted in “Reinventing Education with Baldrige,” needs far-reaching innovation. As Zakaria writes, “Whether measured by the percentage of kids with high-school diplomas or performance on standardized tests, America is not producing the kinds of workers needed in a knowledge-based economy.”

For government, it means funding the kind of basic research that made the U.S. the worldwide leader in innovation. Zakaria describes three great waves that pushed the U.S. to this position: the devastation to Europe of the two world wars; European immigrants who came to American universities, research centers, and think tanks; and massive government funding, which has, according to Zakaria, “been astonishingly productive,” leading “to the development of the Internet, lasers, global positioning satellites, magnetic resonance imaging, DNA sequencing, and hundreds of other technologies.” Today, Zakaria notes, “the government’s share of overall R&D spending remains near its all-time low.”

For the last 20 years, “we kicked all the real problems we face down the road, hoping that someone else would solve them,” writes Zakaria. If we continue to leave that job to other organizations and to other countries, we risk leaving the real problems unsolved and losing the competitive advantage of American innovation.

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