Many recommendations from
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, seem to be coming true. Here is a report he has been involved in recently, the
China Strategy Group final public report from Fall 2020
Comment: This report admits that the US cannot beat China one-on-one due to China's larger scale. The report authors state that having
scale is critical to the ability to develop new technologies. Therefore, the report authors advocate the US pursue a strategy of alliances to cooperate with a large number of democratic countries and achieve high scale.
Additionally, the report focuses things such as:
(1) improving the US government's manpower and intelligence capabilities to identify important emerging technologies, since due to the unpredictable nature of science and innovation, which technologies are important is hard to identify, especially for government bureaucrats. The report suggests more private-public sector cooperation in this regard, since the private sector often knows better than government in this realm.
(2) Identifying core technologies to defend, or "grasping the large and letting go of the small", since no policy can possibly cover all technology. The criteria they identify for an important technology are (a) Is it a choke point technology or single point of failure for an entire field? e.g. Qualcomm for ZTE (b) Does it lead to a highly defensible competitive advantage? e.g. Is it the type of field where once you get a lead, it is very hard for someone else to catch up? How long does the lead last? A lot of this depends on sheer magnitude of resources. (c) Is the technology a security risk? For example, does it give you the ability to intercept communications or shut off a critical system in wartime? (d) Does the technology accelerate other technologies and the overall rate of technological advance across multiple domains? e.g. semiconductors.
The report says meeting any one of these four criteria means it's a high value technology.
(3) There is a section on how the US can dominate platforms. "Platforms" are defined as products (e.g. Windows OS) where the value is driven by the people using the platform (e.g., app developers), instead of the company that built the platform. They rely on network effects to gain scale. Some examples of valuable and strategic platforms identified in the report are USD settlement, search, social networking, mobile app stores, and messaging apps.
(4) The report also includes a section called "Brain Drain Wars" on human capital. This section calls on the US to address bottlenecks in immigration policy (increase high-skilled immigration), educational systems (direct 10% of STEM funding to teaching; industry-university cooperation; study successful students to see if any unusual factors made them successful) and research environments to foster innovation (reduce cost of living in tech hubs, raise pay for Ph.D's doing basic research, etc.).
