Augustine is on a mission to wake up lawmakers, business leaders and anyone else within earshot about the deterioration of American innovation and competitiveness -- and the critical role that science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, plays in getting the United States back on track.
Retired aerospace executive Norm Augustine engineered the 1995 merger that created Lockheed Martin Corp. (IW 500/30). But creating the world's largest defense company pales in comparison with the challenge Augustine has taken on since retiring in 1997.
Augustine is on a mission to wake up lawmakers, business leaders and anyone else within earshot about the deterioration of American innovation and competitiveness -- and the critical role that science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, plays in getting the United States back on track.
"I would ask that if you find yourself in agreement with most of it, that you try to share the circumstance that we find ourselves in with as many people as you can," Augustine implored attendees of Embry-Riddle's Aviation and Aerospace Manufacturing Summit in Fort Worth, Texas.
"Because we aren't going to have a Sputnik moment, a Pearl Harbor, a World Trade Center. This is a slowly impacting disease that we have -- more like a frog being boiled."
Armed with statistics and anecdotes that ran the gamut from sobering to jaw-dropping -- "China is now graduating more English-speaking engineers than the United States," for example, seems to fit in the latter category -- Augustine laid out an urgent case for America to rebuild its crumbling STEM knowledge base.
That, Augustine asserted, is key to supporting America's No. 1 competitive advantage: innovation.
"We most assuredly aren't going to compete based on the cost of labor in this country," Augustine said during his keynote address. "You can hire nine assembly workers in Mexico for the cost of one here. I visited a factory in Vietnam where you can hire 24 workers for the cost of one here.
"Labor costs in those countries are going to rise as their standard of living improves. But it's likely to be a long time before we overcome gaps of the magnitude that exist today."
He concluded: "Technological innovation, wherever its origin, is likely to become the driver of America's future economy."
