The experts warn: If maintaining U.S. R&D leadership is the goal, then both government support and industry practices need to be reconsidered. They contend that federal funding of basic research is slipping even as industry turns from basic to applied research. Further, they say industry has tilted too far toward equating R&D success more with product development than with optimizing the innovation process. In this, the first part of a four-part series,
Recapturing R&D Leadership,
IW explores the scope of the challenges facing U.S. manufacturers.
The growing challenge to U.S. innovation leadership is detailed in the latest R&D forecast from Columbus, Ohio-based Battelle Memorial Institute:
- The federal government is expected to spend $96.6 billion funding R&D efforts, a modest increase of 1.8% over the $94.9 billion spent in 2005
- Industry expenditures on R&D are expected to reach $211.9 billion in 2006 -- an increase of 3.5% over the $204.8 billion expended in 2005.
- Academia and other non-profits make up the remaining expenditure of $20.4 billion with academia increasing by a slim 1.1% and other non-profits increasing by a healthier 3.7%.
A running -- and important -- theme revealed from data and trends throughout the report "is that the support of research and development runs the risk of being viewed as an expense and a luxury, rather than an investment, and one that can be shelved until more funds are available," says Battelle's Jules Duga, a senior research leader and forecast co-author with
R&D Magazine.
The major issue is that Federal support of R&D is not growing rapidly. Indeed funding can be viewed as being essentially flat, says Battelle's Carl Kohrt, president and CEO. "And historically the industrial funding rate has been higher -- 7.5% as opposed to the predicted 3.5%," he adds.
Taken together, those predicted declines are more than incremental shortfalls across the scope of R&D, notes Kohrt. The significance: "While Federal funding of R&D -- basic research -- is declining, industry is shifting its reduced R&D allocation from basic research to primarily applied product development. That delays the new disruptive technologies needed to drive future industrial, [which, in turn] translates into a diminished industrial future as the emergence of new disruptive technology development platforms is delayed."
In addition, Kohrt says the need for basic research has taken on added significance as the excitement of fundamental discovery shifts to the interfaces among scientific disciplines. As an example, he cites the confluence of computational science, biological science and the physical sciences. "Those three will come together in the area of systems biology -- an area where a huge number of basic advances will be made," asserts Kohrt. "In the last century, it was mostly physical sciences and later on computational, but biology was basically an observational science."
Kohrt predicts: "This century will see biology become a quantitative and predictive science. Lab equipment investments will grow. Instead of a lab's typical benchtop apparatus, experiments will tend to require big, expensive equipment such as synchrotron light sources." He notes that Brookhaven National Laboratory's synchrotron is being considered for a costly upgrade to further nanoscience research. Another example is the completion of a $1.4 billion neutron source project in Oakridge, Tenn., adds Kohrt. "It will be able to look at an atomic level in ways that were never conceived of ten years ago."
Built and supported by government funding, these costly scientific tools are intended to help advance interdisciplinary research efforts of companies, universities and individual researchers. Kohrt emphasizes that future advances in interdisciplinary science will increasingly depend on a growing government role in basic research. No company, on its own, would ever be able to afford the necessary scientific equipment, he asserts.
View article on one page