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The United States, the Council of Competitiveness urges, need to regain its competitive edge. This can be accomplished through a partnership with Brazil. The two countries boast a diversity of industries and resource. Together, they can drive innovation-based competitiveness in the new century. A recent summit addressed the five most important global challenges these countries face.

Globalization, trade liberalization and information technology diffusion have opened up growth and investment opportunities around the world – raising the bar for performance, and creating pressures on nations, regions, industries, companies and workers to meet the new standards of global competitiveness.

As the work of the Council on Competitiveness over the past two decades has consistently demonstrated, the United States cannot compete on low wages, commodity products, standardized services, and routine science and technology development. In today’s economy, human capital—the source of creativity and new ideas—plays a paramount role in creating and sustaining a competitive advantage.

With growing competition from Asia and elsewhere, the United States and Brazil—the two largest economies, and two of the most populous countries in the
Western Hemisphere with a diversity of industries and resources—have a strong incentive to work together to attract and assemble the best, most creative human capital to drive innovation-based competitiveness in the 21st century.

To launch a concerted dialogue on these issues, and to evolve a strategic commitment to competitiveness policy and action, the Council on Competitiveness, the Brazilian Competitiveness Movement (Movimento Brasil Competitivo, MBC) and the Brazilian Agency for Industrial Development (Agência Brasileira de Desenvolvimento Industrial, ABDI) have co-hosted, over the past five years, a series of path-breaking workshops, exchanges and summits in both nations.

September Summit
On September 20-21, 2010 at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, the Council and its Brazilian partners hosted a seminal event in this ongoing partnership: the 2nd U.S.-Brazil Innovation Summit (http://www.compete.org/us-brazil) – bringing together more than 400 C-Suite executives, university presidents and senior government officials from both nations to address five global, grand challenges:

• How will the United States and Brazil meet global demand for energy, which will increase by nearly 50 percent in 20 years, while balancing the need for sustainable growth and the use of other critical resources, like water?


• How can two of the world’s leading agricultural producers feed the world, which faces a need to double global food production in 50 years, and continue to innovate at the frontier of the biosciences?


• How do leaders in both nations foster creativity and innovation in a world in which, by 2050, more than two-thirds of the population will live in cities?


• What are the critical tools and infrastructures needed for 21st century innovation, from transportation and logistics networks to broadband and the “cloud,” and how do we best equip ourselves?


• What does manufacturing look like in the 21st century – and how can the United States and Brazil lead in the development and deployment of a platform for the most innovative mix of manufacturing and services that will create the value for society: the new firms, industries and jobs that will define prosperity in the decades to come?

International Meeting of the Minds
Led by Samuel R. Allen, chairman and chief executive officer of Deere & Company, and chairman of the Council, the summit engaged private and public sector leaders in a concentrated dialogue to define solutions to these challenges:

• John J. DeGioia, president, Georgetown University;


• Miguel Jorge, minister of development, Industry and Foreign Trade, Government of Brazil;


• Ambassador Miriam Sapiro, Deputy U.S. Trade Representative;


• Ambassador Thomas A. Shannon, Jr., U.S. ambassador to Brazil;


• Carlos Tadeu da Costa Fraga, executive manager, Petrobrás Research and Development Center;


• Ray O. Johnson, senior vice president and chief technology officer, Lockheed Martin Corporation;


• Mark Little, senior vice president and director of GE Global Research;


• James Pessoa, president and chief executive officer, Vale Energy Solutions;


• Alan Shaw, chief executive officer, Codexis, Inc.;


• Uma Chowdhry, chief science and technology officer, Emeritus, DuPont;


• Harold Schmitz, chief science officer, Mars, Inc.;


• Telma Sinicio, vice president, global innovation, Natura;


• Paul Mascarenas, vice president, engineering – global product development, Ford Motor Company;


• Hermann Ponte e Silva, executive vice president, Embraer;


• Cristiano Amon, senior vice president, QUALCOMM, Inc.;


• Mariano de Beer, chief executive officer, Telefônica do Brasil; et al.

History of Engagement
This 2nd Summit builds on a strong history of innovation-based engagements across the United States and Brazil. It kicked-off in Brasília in July 2007 with the first-of-its-kind U.S.-Brazil Innovation Summit, led by then Deere & Company Chief Executive Officer Robert W. Lane, Grupo Gerdau founder Jorge Gerdau and a delegation of chief executive officers, university presidents and public sector leaders.

Following the success of the 2007 Summit—which produced a Call to Action endorsed by President George W. Bush and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva—the Council and its partners embarked on a journey of thoughtful inquiry and active engagement. Chief executive officers, university presidents, government officials and many others in both countries have been exploring how leadership can coalesce around a series of tangible, bi-national partnerships to deepen mutually beneficial relationships based upon a fundamental belief: that optimizing our societies for innovation is the key to future prosperity.

Innovative Learning Lab
The “innovation” that the partners created to help make such partnerships more concrete—and that served as the backbone for the 2010 2nd U.S.-Brazil Innovation Summit—is the “U.S.-Brazil Innovation Learning Laboratory.”

The Innovation Learning Laboratory is, in essence, a “catalyst” – a series of progressive dialogues and intense workshops aimed at sparking participants to create new-to-the-world partnerships that will boost innovation capacity and value creation in both nations. In fact, between 2008 and 2009, the Council, MBC and ABDI hosted 10 Innovation Learning Laboratories across both nations, focusing the attention of more than 500 participants in Washington, D.C., Brasília, Porto Alegre, Chicago, Raleigh-Durham, São Paulo, Silicon Valley, Rio de Janeiro, Denver/Boulder, and Belo Horizonte on this goal.

The core issues of the U.S.-Brazil Innovation Learning Laboratories—around which tangible partnerships have been forged—include fundamental research, intellectual property, technology transfer, entrepreneurship, commercialization, and the overarching workforce and economic development environment in both nations.

Flowing out of these Learning Laboratories are a series of concrete, bi-national partnerships—generated by the participants themselves—to address real needs and opportunities in both nations. These partnerships were highlighted as key deliverables at the September 2010 2nd U.S.-Brazil Innovation Summit:

• The Bi-National SmartGrid Collaboration Initiative: an industry-university-public sector partnership across both nations to conduct joint research and training in the smart grid space, as well as development of joint smart grid demonstration projects in the United States and Brazil;


• The Cleantech Open Brazil: a multi-stakeholder effort to encourage clean tech entrepreneurship in Brazil, engaging investors and experts from both nations; and,


• The U.S.-Brazil Co-Incubation Initiative: an effort to create incubation hubs –creating a launching pad for U.S. firms looking to do business in Brazil and for Brazilian firms looking to do business in the United States.

Additional projects, brainstormed and scoped in the Innovation Learning Laboratories as well as unearthed at the Summit in a private-public sector “Call to Work,” will continue to come into focus and grow in 2011 and 2012 under the auspices of the Council on Competitiveness-MBC-ABDI.

The Council looks forward to continuing to build on the achievements of the 2nd U.S.–Brazil Innovation Summit and our Innovation Learning Laboratory series – not only because of our conviction that they will help position the United States for success in the 21st century, but also because we feel strongly that these experiences create a new, sustainable and competitiveness-focused economic development model for our nation, the rest of the Western Hemisphere and beyond.

A recognized expert on global competitiveness, Chad Evans is the Council on Competitiveness’ senior vice president.