There is an interesting wrinkle to a recent piece in the New York Times, How Scientific Gains Abroad Pay Off in the U.S.. For years, the refrain in the UK has been that we are great at coming up with ideas, but rubbish at turning them into loot. Given their even later arrival on the route towards commercialisation of science, it is a fair bet that they say the same thing in most European countries.
Too many ideas, the perceived wisdom continues, started here in the UK and ended up making money in the USA and Japan. (That was before China and India “took off”.) Now the New York Times reports that the USA could become even more aggressive at Hoovering up foreign know how.
“By tapping relatively low-cost scientists around the world, American innovators may actually strengthen their market positions.”
This is yet another sign of the continuing “generations” of R&D. (The book, “Third Generation R&D,” may be from 1991, but it is still essential reading.) As the NYT continues:
“Industry … is adapting to a world where scientific goods can come from anywhere — and fewer scientists work on abstract problems unrelated to the market. “It is no accident that many corporate labs have fallen apart,” Sean M. Maloney, executive vice president of Intel, says. “They were science farms looking for problems.”
It is bad enough when knowledge drains out of Europe by “accident”. How much worse will it get when the USA finally wakes up to the fact that it isn’t the source of all great science and starts to mine the world’s R&D systematically?
