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Innovation is key to U.S. regaining competitive edge, expert says at UF
By Anthony Clark | Business editor
As Gainesville ponders its economic future, business professor John Doggett had this warning:
The U.S. is in danger of losing its economic standing in the world unless it can quickly grow the economy by encouraging entrepreneurship such as efforts to build university research inventions into companies.
Doggett was keynote speaker at the Models of Innovation education forum about economic development Thursday night at the University of Florida’s Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.
Doggett is senior lecturer in the Department of Management at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.
The U.S. is losing its competitive edge to countries such as Brazil, Russia, India and China, he said, citing a Conference Board forecast that China will overtake the U.S. as the largest economy in the world next year.
“If that is not a wake-up call, I don’t know what is,” he said.
The answer, Doggett said, is to create communities that encourage entrepreneurship and partner with universities to commercialize research.
The gold standard is Silicon Valley, he said, where Stanford University’s College of Engineering does not grant tenure to any professor who doesn’t start a company.
Doggett was critical of what he said were Washington politicians’ spend-and-tax policies of recent years, putting the nation deeper into debt to foreign countries. He said U.S. companies also have to do business globally to compete, which he said Washington calls “un-American.”
Read more at http://www.gainesville.com/article/20110804/articles/110809745