Since the economy has still not fully recovered from the Great Recession, the challenge for the next administration will be two-fold: restoring U.S. global innovation leadership and driving productivity growth. To achieve robust job growth, the United States needs a growing and competitive “traded sector engine” powered by innovation. America also needs strong productivity growth because it is the surest way of addressing the fiscal challenge. ITIF’s Winning the Race memos one through nine laid out a specific and actionable list of policy recommendations to help America win the innovation race, in areas from tax and trade to digital networks and science. But the real challenge is implementing needed policies. This memo discusses the challenges, principally in the realm of ideas and worldviews, that act as barriers to implementation and proposes one idea to overcome them.
