Summary

Rebooting the American Dream (RAD) is a proposed national challenge-grant program that funds “Regional Centers for Shared Prosperity” in emerging innovation ecosystems, with the intent of (1) accelerating startup creation, (2) developing the next-generation of talent, and (3) providing alternative capitalization models. It is expected that initially funding the program to award six regional challenge grants of $25 million each will yield at least a 3:1 return in private-dollar investments—for a total of $500 million—and create at least 21,000 jobs in underserved areas of the country. In light of the massive job losses induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, RAD grants will build momentum behind existing place-based initiatives and help surface the wealth of diverse human potential and innovation that exists across the United States. 

The RAD proposal aims to revive entrepreneurship across America by helping give every American, regardless of geography, race, gender, or socioeconomic status, the opportunity to build a competitive company. Advancements in internet capabilities, communication tools, and information technology have made entrepreneurship accessible to more people in more places than ever before. Yet massive job losses related to COVID-19 and ever-growing global competition require the United States to discover new ways to create sustainable jobs. Over the past decade, initiatives led by the federal government in partnership with academics and nonprofits have given policymakers a markedly better understanding of the issues facing entrepreneurs. RAD is directly informed by this body of knowledge. By supporting bottom-up, place-based investment and building a network of new ideas through RAD, the Biden-Harris Administration can simultaneously foster American dynamism and strengthen American economic competitiveness.

Summary

The Biden-Harris Administration should create the Local Innovation Unit (LIU) to catalyze and coordinate decentralized, city and county-based experiments focused on the most urgent and complex challenges facing the United States. Traditional “top-down” methods of policy design and problem solving are no longer effective in addressing our nation’s most pressing issues, such as pandemics, climate change, and decreasing economic mobility. The nature of these problems, coupled with an absence of tested solutions or “best practices” and ongoing partisan gridlock, demands a more agile and experimental “bottom-up” approach. Such an approach focuses on empowering coalitions of social innovators at the local level—including local governments, private-sector businesses, community-based organizations, philanthropists, and universities—to design and test solutions that work for their communities. Promising solutions can then be scaled horizontally (e.g., to other cities and counties) and vertically (e.g., to inform federal policy and action).

The LIU will be a place-based policy initiative consisting of two primary components: (1) multi-city and county experimentation cohorts organized around common problems, via which local coalitions design and test solutions within their communities, and (2) a digital platform, housed in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), that will help LIU participants connect, exchange materials and resources, help participants collect and visualize data, evaluate solutions, and publish lessons learned.

Summary

COVID-19 has reshaped every facet of our social and professional experiences. What began for almost all of us as a short-term work-from-home event has turned into a prolonged crisis that will have lasting effects on how we interact with each other and do business. Even as vaccine rollouts continue and offices slowly start to reopen, much work will continue to be remote. Employees are likely to work staggered schedules or in predefined groups in order to maintain social distancing for an unknown period of time. Many meetings and tasks that went virtual during the pandemic will likely stay that way. And employers of all types, including governments, will continue to rely heavily on technology to keep employees and customers connected and engaged.

The pandemic accelerated an already rapid ongoing shift to a tech-driven world. As a nation, we must similarly accelerate investments in information technology (IT) to support this new normal. COVID-19 has already exposed critical weakness in existing U.S. IT systems at the federal, state and local levels. Technical problems delayed millions of Americans from receiving unemployment benefits, and are now delaying millions more from receiving timely vaccines. Remote work is raising equity issues and cybersecurity concerns, and periodic internet outages have caused major disruptions to school and work.

The upshot is clear: our investments in IT modernization and cloud computing over the last 10 years have not been sufficient. It’s time to start talking about the next steps the United States can and must take to lead at the federal level, ensuring that our nation’s IT infrastructure and tools can securely and adequately support all remote workers while providing secure, reliable, and state-of-the-art online services.

Summary

The Biden-Harris Administration should expand the focus of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Program Office (LPO) to meet the demands of a changing energy industry. The LPO was established to serve as a backstop to private-sector financing for large-scale energy projects with embedded technology risk. The program’s success in scaling large scale power plants and manufacturing plants for next generation energy technologies is well documented. However, the energy industry has changed since the program’s beginning, and the needs for support from the federal government have evolved. For example, technology areas that were deemed risky in 2009 are now mature, and in some circumstances, for example in electricity generation, the industry structure that was historically highly centralized has become much more distributed. Modernizing the LPO is a critical means for advancing the Biden-Harris Administration’s climate agenda because the Office supports the development of clean energy projects at commercial scale, leverages private sector capital, and creates middle-class jobs.

This memo recommends three important changes to the DOE LPO:

1. The aperture of the LPO must be expanded to include a much larger set of technology areas. In particular, energy storage, hydrogen production and carbon capture, utilization and storage, among other nascent fields, should be supported. Authorizing legislation should be changed to give the Program Office the opportunity to support a technological area at its discretion.
2. The Loan Program must reduce the cost of application to incentivize more deployment of smaller projects. This will expand the potential set of projects to be supported and align the Office with overarching trends in the energy sector.
3. The Loan Program should expand its purview to support projects impeded by other financing risks in the energy system. These could include grid modernization, system hardening or smart grid updates (which often do not pass traditional cost-benefit analyses), and electric vehicle infrastructure deployment.

Summary

The United States leads the world in the market share – and ‘mindshare’ – of massive digital platforms in domains such as advertising, search, social media, e-commerce, and financial technologies. Each of these digital domains features one or two dominant market players who have become big through the ‘network effect,’ wherein large volumes of customer activity provide data inputs to make these platforms work even better. However, the gains that big players enjoy from the network effect often come at the expense of the platform’s customers. The network effect is further amplified by platform lock-in, whereby new platforms are unable to interoperate with existing market players. A more serious risk manifests when the dominant platform provider provides the same services as that of businesses using the platform, thus becoming a competitor with a built-in information advantage. This prevents new entrants to the market from growing big, limiting the choices available to consumers and creating the conditions for harmful monopolies to emerge.

Therefore, the Biden-Harris Administration should advocate for legislation and enact policies designed to bring openness and transparency into the digital platforms marketplace. A key aspect of such policies would be to require a set of interoperability standards for large digital platforms. Another would be to require open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow customers (end-users as well as businesses) to seamlessly take their data with them to competitors. These actions will unleash greater competition in the digital marketplaces that are becoming the mainstay of the US economy and increase transparency, choice and opportunities that the US consumer and businesses can benefit from.

Summary

The United States is an invention and innovation powerhouse that has long produced remarkable achievements. Yet American invention is at a crossroads today. After more than a half-century of unrivaled global leadership in basic science, innovation, and manufacturing, the U.S. is losing ground throughout the innovation pipeline across a wide range of sectors. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed this vulnerability, making brutally clear the need for innovation to address major challenges that arise and highlighting weaknesses such as our dependency on global supply chains. A strong Invention Ecosystem can power our path to economic recovery, sustained growth and societal resilience.

This report explains the functions of the Invention Ecosystem, presenting a framework that highlights the ecosystem’s main components and the inventor and innovation pathways that 1) inspire and prepare students and future inventors to address crucial challenges and thrive and support the innovation economy, and 2) build and sustain today’s inventors and entrepreneurs to enable value creation from their ideas in the form of products and businesses. These pathways together will yield a pipeline of people and businesses that create jobs, foster resilient economies, and produce solutions to our most pressing challenges.

The ecosystem is outlined in four sections, represented by its distinct pillars including K-12 education, higher education, entrepreneurship and industry. Each section describes the role of the pillar, features specific challenges related to the ecosystem, and offers a set of discrete policy recommendations for a policymaker audience to extract and optimize the full value of U.S. innovation.

This report was produced by the Day One Project with support from the Lemelson Foundation.

Summary

Comprehensive and reliable mortality data is vital for public health research. Improving our infrastructure for managing these data will generate insights that promote longevity and healthy aging, as well as enable more effective response to rapidly evolving public health challenges like those posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. A modernized mortality data system will ultimately be self-sustaining through access fees, but will require federal investment to update state reporting infrastructure and data use agreements. The Biden-Harris administration should launch an effort to modernize our nation’s infrastructure for aggregating, managing, and providing research access to mortality data.

Summary

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgent need to address lags in American pharmaceutical manufacturing. An investment of $5 billion over five years will improve U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturing infrastructure, including the development of new technologies that will enable the responsive, end-to-end, on-demand production of up to half of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) list of 223 essential medicines by year two, and the entire portfolio by year five. Spearheading improvements in domestic manufacturing capacity, coupled with driving the advancement of new adaptive, on-demand, and other advanced medicine production technologies will ensure a safe, responsive, reliable, and affordable supply of quality medicines, improving access for all citizens, including vulnerable populations living in underserved urban communities, rural areas, and tribal territories.

Summary

The Biden-Harris Administration should establish a National DeepTech Capital Fund (NDTC Fund) to bridge capital gaps and enable more DeepTech entrepreneurs to bring promising and beneficial technologies to market. 

Greater investment in DeepTech is critical in order to return the United States to the forefront of advanced science and technology research and development (R&D). “DeepTech” refers to companies and innovators building science-based, or R&D-based, products and services including hardware and advanced materials, robotics, manufacturing, and biotech. U.S. government investment in technology has declined by two-thirds in the past decades. Private capital typically eschews investment in advanced technologies, due to a combination of the additional expertise needed for and risks inherent to advanced-technology investment. Silicon Valley’s early days were cushioned by government risk capital at a time when the private sector could not see the value of investing in R&D. But relying entirely on Silicon Valley to drive investment in innovation has led the U.S. to a point where it risks being replaced by other innovation centers such as China. A National DeepTech Capital Fund would encourage and enable investment in companies building solutions to society’s greatest challenges, while ensuring that the United States remains at the center of global innovation.

Summary

Science and technology (S&T) must play a prominent and strategic role at all levels of United States foreign policy. On Day One, the Biden-Harris Administration should reinvigorate and reassert U.S. strength in science, technology, and data-driven decision making. S&T issues at the Department of State (Department) have historically been concentrated into specific offices and personnel, which has constrained the use of S&T as a tool to advance U.S. foreign policy goals. On Day One, the Administration can better identify, allocate, and elevate S&T issues and personnel throughout the Department. Building and rewarding diverse teams with the right mix of skills is good management for any organization, and could create significant progress toward breaking down the silos that prevent the realization of the full benefits of the S&T expertise that already exists among U.S diplomatic personnel.

Summary

This transition document provides over 25 actionable recommendations on the future of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), in order to support future federal leadership and enable their success. The document is the result of collaboration between the Day One Project and a group of veteran policymakers who convened virtually to produce recommendations related to the following three categories:

1. Identifying specific policy and governance ideas that can be pursued in the first days and months of the next administration.
2. Gathering “lessons learned” from those who have previously served in government to learn from past challenges and better inform future initiatives.
3. Understanding key science and technology staffing and “talent” needs, and related challenges for the USPTO that can be addressed in the next administration.

The document also includes a cover memo which highlights some of the overarching key considerations for the future of the USPTO.

Contributors

• Margo A. Bagley
• Sharon Barner
• Brian Cassidy
• Colleen V. Chien
• Mark Allen Cohen
• Ayala Deutsch
• Ben Haber
• Philip G. Hampton
• Justin Hughes
• David J. Kappos
• Quentin Palfrey
• Arti K. Rai
• Teresa Stanek Rea
• Robert L. Stoll
• A. Christal Sheppard
• Saurabh Vishnubhakat
• Stephen Yelderman

Summary

The next administration should launch national Place-Based Public-Private Partnerships for Innovation (P4I) to supercharge American innovation by leveraging the power of proximity and partnerships, and in so doing, lay the foundation for a new and more inclusive era of American prosperity.

The P4I initiative will catalyze the formation and growth of vibrant Innovation Zones (IZs), creating powerful points of convergence that weave together place-based investments with educational, research, entrepreneurship, and economic supports to advance inclusive economic development from the American heartland to the coasts. IZs will catalyze the public-private development of mixed-use innovation hubs that house and support: training programs to prepare diverse and resilient labor forces; advanced research and development (R&D) activities undertaken by partnerships between universities and industry; and, incubators, accelerators, and investor groups to incubate, grow, and retain high-tech businesses.

P4I should be implemented by an interagency committee convened by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) under the auspices of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). An interagency initiative will be critical for success, mobilizing federal agencies that share responsibility for all aspects of innovation and economic development policy, including STEM R&D, formation and growth of U.S. innovation industries (small to large), and innovation-based economic and workforce development.