I’m a perennial optimist about the future of the United States, provided enough people hear the call I make in Innovation Nation and that others are making in many other fora. But I was chilled to the bone by the release this month of the National Endowment for the Arts’ study on reading in the U.S. Here’s from the introduction:

The story the data tell is simple, consistent, and alarming. Although there has been measurable progress in recent years in reading ability at the elementary school level, all progress appears to halt as children enter their teenage years. There is a general decline in reading among teenage and adult Americans. Most alarming, both reading ability and the habit of regular reading have greatly declined among college graduates. These negative trends have more than literary importance. As this report makes clear, the declines have demonstrable social, economic, cultural, and civic implications.

How does one summarize this disturbing story? As Americans, especially younger Americans, read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they have lower levels of academic achievement. (The shameful fact that nearly one-third of American teenagers drop out of school is deeply connected to declining literacy and reading comprehension.) With lower levels of reading and writing ability, people do less well in the job market. Poor reading skills correlate heavily with lack of employment, lower wages, and fewer opportunities for advancement. Significantly worse reading skills are found among prisoners than in the general adult population. And deficient readers are less likely to become active in civic and cultural life, most notably in volunteerism and voting.

I wish there was something positive I could say comes out of the report, but the picture is truly bleak.

Last weekend my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle, published an interview with me about Innovation Nation. I think they did a good job (but I’m biased), but what has been fascinating is the volume of emails from people for whom the article touched a chord. My views on the importance of transforming education in the U.S. seemed to be particularly resonant. I’d like to single out two emails in particular.

First, I received a note from Marc Abelard, director of partnerships and external affairs at The Engineering School in Boston. Here’s his description of the school: “TES is a Boston Public High School with a population of 350 students. The mission of TES is to provide a pathway for African American, Latino and young women to national and international careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics… TES is also a proud member of the PTC.MIT Consortium. The PTC.MIT Consortium mission is to ‘bridge the needs of industry with the future of education” The Consortium has over 80 partners across universities, non profits, schools and industry. Currently the Consortium is taking the lead on establishing a Global Design Challenge. TES will act as a pilot site for the first UK/US Collaboration using a Global Design Challenge in STEM.”

I want to find out more about TES, but it’s exactly the kind of educational initiative I argue is vital for our country’s future.

Then I heard from a young girl who lives in northern California. Because of her age, I won’t reveal her identity, and I’ve taken out some of the details, but I find this extraordinary. There are a host of lessons here for our system:

I am glad that someone is finally serious about our country’s lack of concern about science education and research.

I am a student at [a local community college] in their “exceptional student” program for K-12 students. I am considered by my school district to be in 8th grade, but I am enrolled in college English, chemistry and mathematics. When I tried to skip 8th grade last year and move on to high school, I was refused by the high school for no known cause…

The letter refusing to admit me didn’t even spell my name correctly. I suppose they didn’t think it was very important. But I think my experience in trying to work with the school district illustrates how impossible it is for an individual to be fairly considered. How can anyone improve science and mathematics levels in the US when no student is allowed to compete at the level she is capable simply because the bureaucracy doesn’t want to let her?

I had to leave my school district and enroll in a charter school that lets me take college classes. I took placement tests and tested out of Algebra I (which I would have had to take if I had stayed at my middle school). I enrolled in Geometry for summer session, got an “A”, and am now finishing up Algebra II, which I wasn’t supposed to take until my junior year in high school. I found I love proofs in geometry, and I am looking forward to taking trigonometry next semester. I also scored at the highest level for English, and took college freshman English 101A in summer (I got an A”) and am taking English 101B right now, earning UC credit. I have known since I was in 4th grade that I wanted to go to UC Berkeley and major in astrophysics. I have always loved going to Cal Day with my parents, and I always like to see Professor Shugart’s “Fun with Physics” talk.

My brother and I won honorable mention for a paper we submitted last spring to the Toshiba Exploravision competition entitled “Mars Colonization Vehicle (MCV): An Earth-Mars Orbital Asteroid Transport for Mars Colonization”. We were invited to present our work at the 10th annual Mars Society Convention at UCLA a few months ago. It was the first time I had ever done a formal presentation – both my brother and I have competed in science fair competitions, but that’s a posterboard presentation in a roomful of loud obnoxious kids – not a professional presentation complete with scientists. It was one of the most exciting and stressful things I had ever done, but we did very well (I’m told) and had 40 minutes of questions.

I went with my brother to the NASA Director’s Breakfast at NASA-Ames last spring… It was a bummer, because the Director never showed up even though he was supposed to be there. One scientist who was there went ahead and did a spontaneous talk about his field of research to fill up the time (on extraterrestrial life and microbial mats), and they were trying to get another person to do a talk, but he arrived very late. The room was dark, because they didn’t want to waste money turning on the lights for us. It was a mess. They clearly didn’t care about us. I decided that I didn’t want to work for NASA, because they talk about encouraging science but through their actions do the opposite.

So as you launch your panels and initiatives, please give some consideration to the K-12 students who want to study and advance, but are constantly told to shut up and memorize obscure and useless bits of information for the STAR tests. That’s why the US is doing so much worse in science and math. And if a student wants to do more, she’s constantly told that she can’t move forward but told no reason why. I was lucky that my parents understood and found another route for me.

Anyone who visits my office quickly realizes I have a near-insatiable thirst for books on topics that interest me. For all of the benefits of new media forms, books are still essential transmitters of substantive knowledge. The UPS and Fedex carriers who groan at the number of deliveries to my office need to brace themselves, because David Warsh’s excellent Economic Principals brings news of two books that I need to read: Titans and Tigers: Biomedicine and Innovation Systems in China, India, USA, Ireland, Denmark and Finland and Dynamic Innovation Systems in the Nordic Countries.

I’ll let Warsh explain:

[The biomedicine] study is couched in terms of comparing the performance of various national innovation systems. Far too little has been said about this empirical effort to identify the sources of innovation and the mechanisms to which they could be turned to commercial advantage, which was developed by Richard Nelson, Nathan Rosenberg, Christopher Freeman, Giovanni Dosi, Luc Soete and other scholars in the 1970s and 1980s, and adopted in the 1990s by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as a framework for policy analysis. 

The current study of biomedicine is built on an earlier survey by [Håkan] Gergils, Dynamic Innovation Systems in the Nordic Countries, in which he found that only the Finns had put the new idea into practice to any significant extent. Iceland, meanwhile, had adopted the Finnish model. Norway had been talking for thirty years about bringing its R&D spending up to the OECD target for 2010 of around 3 percent of GDP, but hasn’t hit it yet; Denmark might reach 1 percent by then, but only if it doubled current spending levels.

In Innovation Nation I examine some different national innovation systems. I’m currently preparing some modifications of the book for foreign language editions, and the analysis of different systems will be considerably extended.

In chapter nine of Innovation Nation I point to Santa Clara County, the heart of Silicon Valley, as an example of how the U.S. has the natural resources for cultural intelligence. The San Jose Mercury News confirms this in its latest report on the county’s diversity:

Santa Clara County is one of only two counties in America where there are enough Indians, Mexicans, Chinese and Vietnamese for the Census Bureau to generate a detailed profile for each group. Los Angeles County is the other.

Salon’s Andrew Leonard follows the Merc’s link to the census data to pull out the amazing statistics:

There are 101,551 Indian immigrants living in the county, as compared to 155,597 Chinese, 382,777 Mexicans and 110,869 Vietnamese. That’s 750,794 people out of a total of 1,731,281 residents.

Andy Hargadon is a lucid thinker about innovation. His book, How Breakthroughs Happen, is one of the best innovation books of recent years. On his infrequent blog, he writes today about the challenge of innovation in energy:

The entrepreneurs and venture capitalists of the Silicon Valley are turning their attention to energy and climate change with the full intent of revolutionizing those sectors with the same modus operandi that enabled them to lead the information revolution.  But the circumstances are quite different.  Energy is a brownfield–the installed systems are as difficult to resect from existing physical infrastructure (buildings, homes, and automobiles) as they are from the political infrastructure (from municipalities, states, and Washington).

BusinessWeek’s special report on the innovation president culls an interesting set of ideas from each of the major presidential candidates in both parties. They survey the innovation platforms of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Bill Richardson, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and John McCain.

It’s heartening to see that all want to spend more on science, math and engineering education. I argue in Innovation Nation that we need to take a broader view of innovation than just technology, but boosting education in those areas would be a good start, certainly.

Via Web Worker Daily, I’ve come across EmployeeSuggestionBox, a hosted service that enables companies to organize polls, online brainstormings and other collaborative initiatives. It’s great that there are more and more technology-based services that foster collaboration and idea generation, but organizations should realize that effective innovation processes require considerable skills of facilitation and guidance.

Technology can help, certainly, but it can’t provide the entire solution.

In Innovation Nation, I suggested the president appoint a National Innovation Advisor, along the lines of the National Security Advisor and the National Economic Advisor. So I was interested to see today that Barack Obama is proposing the creation of a national Chief Technology Officer. The TechPresident blog has an interesting round-up of the reactions from some of the digerati supporters of Obama. You can find Obama’s full technology and innovation policy here.

Obama’s announcement is another sign that the importance of innovation is getting through on the national agenda. Hillary Clinton has made a call for the U.S. to become a true innovation nation part of her regular stump speech in the last month. I hope every candidate hears the call on innovation.

Jon Cohn’s article in The New Republic on medical innovation is receiving a lot of attention. In response, Tyler Cowen makes some excellent points about the nuanced relationship between public and private sectors in innovation:

1. The strength of American medical innovation stems from the combination between the NIH, private philanthropy, and commercial incentives.  Cohn has lots of (just) praise for the NIH, as basic research is often a public good.  But he doesn’t say enough about philanthropy, and he confuses pro-NIH evidence with showing the superfluity of commercial incentives.

2. Send some flowers to Cynthia Kenyon, whom I could not personally quote in this manner with a straight face.  You would never know that universities are profiting from drugs, and patenting them, at an unprecedented rate.  Universities are also forming partnerships with drug companies at an unprecedented rate.

3. Companies must work very hard to translate basic research into usable applied form and the U.S. is a clear world leader in this regard.  A drug idea is not the same as a drug.  Cohn at times admits this, but is he really denying that the supply curve here slopes upward with regard to expected profits?  You can cite all kind of “mixed” factors about commercial incentives but at the end of the day that is the basic question.

4. Statins, Prozac, and anti-AIDS drugs are notable examples of #1.  Or try this list of Merck products.  Merck and Pfizer are much more than simply marketing or doctor bribery machines, although admittedly they are that too.

5. The standard arguments against commercial “me-too” drugs are considerably overrated.

6. FDA restrictions are at least partly responsible for the costly, overly concentrated, and blockbuster-oriented nature of U.S. and other pharmaceutical companies.  Tight regulations discriminate against the small company and the small idea.  Even if you think tight regulations are a good idea, don’t blame these tendencies on the big bad corporations.

7. It is odd for Cohn to cite me as his libertarian foil, since the referenced piece very clearly cites the NIH as a critical factor behind American medical innovation.  This odd citation again represents the desire to replace “anti-commercial” arguments with an easier-to-make “pro-NIH” case.

9. The NIH works as well as it does because the money is mostly protected from Congress.  It is not a success which can easily be replicated.  The more money is at stake, the more Congress wants to influence allocation.  We should guard this feature of the system jealously and try to learn from it.  If we can.

The bottom line: Arguments for the NIH are not arguments against the importance of commercial incentives for medical innovation.

Chapter seven of Innovation Nation is titled The “Us” in USA, and looks at the power of open, bottom-up organization. It’s heartening to see one of Silicon Valley’s giants, Oracle, getting with the program:

Oracle made its official debut on the social web party scene this week at the Oracle OpenWorld 2007 conference in San Francisco. Previously a Web 2.0 wallflower, the database and business applications company has joined the scene with gusto, launching social networking for its customers and employees, deploying a customer wiki with WetPaint — even issuing press passes to bloggers.

An even better example of Oracle opening up is that it co-hosted this month’s San Francisco Pecha Kucha night.  Haven’t encountered Pecha Kucha before? It’s an evening where designers present their work in public, with a great format:

Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each - giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.

If you’re interested in rapid fire exposure to the liveliest design ideas, rush out and find the nearest Pecha Kucha to you.