Posts Tagged: "National Science Foundation"

On the morning of Thursday, July 19th, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a hearing titled China’s Threat to American Government and Private Sector Research and Innovation Leadership. The day’s hearing was dedicated to discuss strategies, both legal and illicit, which are employed by the Chinese government and designed to gain a competitive advantage over the United States.

Certain innovations—known as enabling technologies—provide the foundation for progress across a range of industries. Enabling technologies include mobile wireless, the laser, CT scanners, the microprocessor, artificial intelligence, and freight containerization. Such technologies drive wealth creation throughout the economy. However, the difficulties associated with monetizing this type of IP, which I explore in this article, mean that private enterprise tends to underinvest in new enabling technologies. Public policy needs to be more supportive, and firms need to be willing to support more blue-sky projects. As a nation, we are harvesting the fruits of old enabling technologies without investing sufficiently in new ones. We are eating our seed corn.

There are challenges that must be overcome through innovation before 5G becomes commercially feasible. Device-to-device communications, which allow mobile device owners to communicate directly without a base station, face challenges of inter-cell interference caused by many small cells operating in an area, as well as difficulties in device discovery. Software defined cellular networks, which are directly programmable without hardware changes, offer simplified network design and dynamic configuration capabilities, but global standards and network infrastructure application are still lacking. To address these and other issues, the White House recently announced a $400 million initiative for advanced wireless research, which will be spearheaded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

In recent years, the Chinese government has promoted a roadmap towards “indigenous innovation” which would see the country become a technological superpower by the year 2050. This would be fine if China intended to do so while following international rules regarding intellectual property, but it seems pretty intent on flouting whatever regulations get in the country’s way in that regard. News reports in recent years indicate that China continues to press foreign entities to follow joint venture rules in which foreign players are required to transfer IP to Chinese domestic firms despite the fact that this breaks rules put in place by the World Trade Organization, of which China has been a member since 2001.