Akron Beacon Journal Cites Council Member on Research Funding

The United States and the nation’s higher education institutions need to improve how they fund and conduct research in order to stay globally robust and competitive, the head of the University of Akron said.

The United States’ share of nearly $1 trillion in annual global research and development spending has been dropping while the share of the rest of the world is rising, Luis Proenza, university president, said in a talk Thursday morning in the student union theater.

“The percentage of market share the U.S. has enjoyed is declining,’’ he said.

America’s global primacy is being challenged by the very technological forces that the nation itself unleashed, he said.

But there are also many opportunities for the nation and U.S.-based higher education to gain market share in global research and development, he said.

Technological innovation is the engine for economic development, Proenza said.

“We must focus the entire nation…our entire society, on innovation,’’ he said. “If we do so, I know we will continue to have knowledge which will bring about the kind of technological innovation that will create the future and in that way prosper both as academics and as a nation.’’

Proenza delivered the keynote speech to kick off the 25th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Polymer Engineering program at the university. The three-day event began with a family picnic on Wednesday and concludes today after a roundtable discussion on global competition.

Proenza’s talk focused on the interaction among science, technology and economics, or what he called the “innovation ecosystem.’’ He serves on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the nation’s highest-level policy advisory board on science and technology, and is a member of the Council on Competitiveness.

“New technology has always destroyed jobs at the trailing edge of the economy,’’ Proenza said. “At the same time, new jobs are being created at the leading edge of the economy by the new technology.’’

Executives of high-tech start-ups are increasingly saying that their employees need to be prepared for failure, to be prepared to adapt to the fast pace of technical innovation, and to be prepared for changing careers three, five or more times during their lifetimes, he said.

“Whether as individuals or as a society, we prepare ourselves best for change by continuously developing our skills in keeping with the changing requirements of business,’’ Proenza said

From that perspective, current personal or political preoccupations about outsourcing seem quaint and at odds with reality, he said.

In looking at such things as the debate over the outsourcing of jobs, “time and again, we have seen how the politics of fear have thrown monkey wrenches into the unstoppable flow of technological progress,’’ Proenza said. The debate over outsourcing misses the perspective of the tumult caused by the dynamism of the United States, he said.

Industries are constantly churning and at a faster pace, he said.

Jobs aren’t being outsourced—the jobs that no longer exist here simply don’t exist anywhere, he said. “Ours truly is an age of global change,’’ Proenza said.

Other nations use research and science to drive economic growth, and the United States must do so, too, he said.

“It is from research new companies are born and new jobs created,’’ he said. “It is from research that the economy expands and new wealth is created.’’

In the changing global economy, the issue isn’t one of simple competition “but one of America’s capacity to innovate and thereby continue to have a place in the global economy and have its own economic growth,’’ Proenza said.

Of the approximately $340 billion spent annually in the United States in research and development, universities and colleges get nearly $40 billion, or just about 14 percent, Proenza said.

“Hey, guys, think about this: There’s huge opportunity to gain market share,’’ he said. “We do very important things, but the sun does not revolve around us. It doesn’t revolve around industry, either. It doesn’t revolve around government labs, either. …There is a huge opportunity to participate in the global economy.’’