On this day in 1957, the Soviet Union deployed Sputnik. The two-foot, 180-pound orb’s beeping was the starting gun of the space race and we in the U.S. seemed to be just putting our sneakers on. Despite President Eisenhower’s initial shrug, America freaked out – but in good way. In under a year, a Democratic Congress and the Republican President created and made operational the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The National Defense Education Act, which not only jump started...

The United States, international development organizations like the World Bank, and fellow developed countries continue to give China—the world's second largest economy which holds $2.85 trillion in foreign currency reserves and which in 2011 will become the world's largest manufacturer—billions of dollars in development assistance. In fact, China receives more than $2.5 billion a year in foreign government aid, according to the OECD. But China effectively plays all these countries and...

In recent months, Japan has been getting increased attention; not for its economic success, but its supposed failure. Jeff Kingston’s "Contemporary Japan: History Politics, and Social Change since the 1980s" tells a story of Japan in stagnation since the bursting in the early 1990s of its economic bubble (like us, based on excessive real estate values). "The Economist" describes Japan as being in a state of “gentle decline.” The "New York Times" has been running a series on “Japan’s slow disheartening...

In the software business, we learned a decade or so ago that the right level of abstraction at which to “export” software design ideas was the design pattern. Taken from Christopher Alexander’s classsic, work on pattern languages for architecture, the idea of a software design pattern is an abstraction from details of implementation to the gist of the software algorithm.  Software design patterns are widely used to disseminate innovations in software (they should, in a rational world, be the only...

As it’s becoming clearer every day that innovation is the central driver of economic growth, more and more countries are trying to be innovation leaders. Unfortunately, in that quest all too many countries are choosing to go down a path of “innovation mercantilism” by implementing beggar-thy-neighbor strategies designed to gain advantage at the expense of other nations and overall global innovation progress. These nations see the royal road to prosperity as through expanded technology exports...

As Director of Research at Valhalla Partners (my day job), a venture-capital firm in Northern Virginia, I’ve thought quite a bit about sources of regional advantage in the Washington, DC area.  One thing we understand very well in Washington is process, although many of us are frustrated with it more often than excited by it.  But to my mind, it can be a source of strength. Many of our processes are pretty good.  Consider, for example, a process we might call “Forming Consensus Among Disparate...