Needed: A National Innovation Agenda
This week my inaugural column appeared on BusinessWeek.com. No sense in starting small so I called for a national innovation agenda.
In the coming months, our government is going to throw a lot of money at some very big problems. The amount is staggering-a $787 billion stimulus package combined with a proposed $3.6 trillion federal budget. That kind of market-making money should be able to drive the bold changes we need in health care and education.
I fear it will not.
It would be a shame if the nation’s palpable hunger for fresh ideas and approaches resulted only in incremental change. The problem I see is that most of the money is about to travel through existing pipes to sustain the way the health-care and education industries currently operate. This path simply maintains the status quo.
If we want bold change, we have to allocate more of the federal investment to the design and testing of new approaches that are not constrained by existing ones.
