BW: Does the US Face an Innovation Crisis?

BW: Does the US Face an Innovation Crisis?

Ever since the late 1950s the United States has suffered bouts of insecurity about its innovation lead. The Russians in space. The Japanese in industry after Industry. And now the Indians and Chinese. The latest flurry of worries was clearly brought on by a combination of the dot-com bust and the acceleration of outsourcing. It has blossomed into a full-blown anxiety attack with the global recession and the clear signal that a lot of the most obvious US innovation in the first eight years of this decade was so-called financial innovation—which brought disastrous results. Now the calls for action are louder, including this package we at BusinessWeek put together in the last issue.