Stephen Ezell, Matt Stepp, and Rob Atkinson contributed to this summary. The President mentioned many issues ITIF focuses on in his State of the Union address last night. And by in large, we agree with what he said when it comes to economic competitiveness. The President deserves praise for putting these issues, specifically manufacturing, front and center. He helped rally the nation and the Congress to the fact that restoration of competitiveness and a vibrant manufacturing sector are, indeed...

The following is one of two cross-posted contributions from ITIF to National Journal. Job growth in clean energy is a tricky subject. As Brookings found, green sector employment has increased substantially in recent years, and this trend is to be applauded. But a key economic challenge is to make sure that we aren’t just swapping green jobs for fossil energy jobs, and are actually achieving net job growth. And an important way to do that is to look beyond the US market. Think of it this way: over...

Stop the madness!  Purge “tax and spend liberal,” and “corporate welfare proponent” from your label lexicons.  Don’t use phrases such as “industrial policy” and “cut spending across the board” and “big business giveaways” unless you really know what they mean.  The near-death experience with the economy in 2008-9 and painfully slow recovery are the result of often well-intentioned but ultimately flawed policies championed by Democrats and Republicans alike over the last 30 years.  Individual consumers...

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...