Crowdsourcing Ideas to Accelerate Economic Growth and Prosperity through a Strategy for American Innovation


Jason Miller and Tom Kalil at the White House Blog: “America’s future economic growth and international competitiveness depend crucially on our capacity to innovate. Creating the jobs and industries of the future will require making the right investments to unleash the unmatched creativity and imagination of the American people.
We want to gather bold ideas for how we as a nation can build on and extend into the future our historic strengths in innovation and discovery. Today we are calling on thinkers, doers, and entrepreneurs across the country to submit their proposals for promising new initiatives or pressing needs for renewed investment to be included in next year’s updated Strategy for American Innovation.
What will the next Strategy for American Innovation accomplish? In part, it’s up to you. Your input will help guide the Administration’s efforts to catalyze the transformative innovation in products, processes, and services that is the hallmark of American ingenuity.
Today, we released a set of questions for your comment, which you can access here and on Quora – an online platform that allows us to crowdsource ideas from the American people.

  Calling on America’s Inventors and Innovators for Great Ideas
Among the questions we are posing today to innovators across the country are:

  • What specific policies or initiatives should the Administration consider prioritizing in the next version of the Strategy for American Innovation?
  • What are the biggest challenges to, and opportunities for, innovation in the United States that will generate long-term economic growth and rising standards of living for more Americans?
  • What additional opportunities exist to develop high-impact platform technologies that reduce the time and cost associated with the “design, build, test” cycle for important classes of materials, products, and systems?
  • What investments, strategies, or technological advancements, across both the public and private sectors, are needed to rebuild the U.S. “industrial commons” (i.e., regional manufacturing capabilities) and ensure the latest technologies can be produced here?
  • What partnerships or novel models for collaboration between the Federal Government and regions should the Administration consider in order to promote innovation and the development of regional innovation ecosystems?

 
In today’s world of rapidly evolving technology, the Administration is adapting its approach to innovation-driven economic growth to reflect the emergence of new and exciting possibilities. Now is the time to gather input from the American people in order to envision and shape the innovations of the future. The full Request for Information can be found here and the 2011 Strategy for American Innovation can be found here. Comments are due by September 23, 2014, and can be sent to innovationstrategy@ostp.gov.  We look forward to hearing your ideas!”