Change Papers: A shared effort to change North Carolina's climate for innovation.

David Brooks’ op-ed in the New York Times December 8 takes a look at President Obama’s “national innovation agenda,” and highlights nine things the columnist thinks are important about it. Whether you agree or not with what his  nine things are, the op-ed is valuable mostly as a reminder that there is a developing “national innovation strategy” for NC to fit in with and look for connections to, as we noted in Paper 04.

Some of the work on the national agenda will help support the argument we need to make in NC — that innovation needs to be taken seriously as a focus for our future prosperity; some of the national agenda items can support the idea that there are actually policy strategies that can support the growth of innovation (I like Brooks’ characterization of the role of government being to “steer and spark innovation without controlling it.“); and a few items on the agenda we need to be keeping an eye on to see if we can position ourselves to take advantage of them.

Our community colleges and universities, for example, are aggressively pursuing both increased access to education and improved completion rates (number one on the Brooks list), and our university campuses have been applying their heads off for some of the basic (and applied) research funding (number two on the Brooks list). And we should look for complementary state policies that can support the retention of highly-skilled immigrant entrepreneurs (a build off of number six on the list).

But I think we need to take seriously another item on his list as well — positioning ourselves for one or more of these “regional innovation centers.”  This will require a collective effort of the private sector, government, higher ed and others to name what we want to be best in the world at, but it’s time we start doing that. In the UNC system where I work, our research leaders on campuses are starting to narrow down what their “biggest priorities” are, responding to Erskine Bowles’ reminder that “if you’re about everything, you’re about nothing.” We need to do the same sort of hard thinking for the state as a whole.

Identifying and being selected to host a regional innovation center might require reaching across state lines, forming alliances we haven’t before. And it will take some real political will. The state Innovation Council getting underway next month should at least name the importance of doing this kind of thinking, and might even kick off the process to identify what a North Carolina-based “regional innovation center” might look like and focus on.

Tags: Barack Obama, David Brooks, immigrant entrepreneurs, innovation, Innovation Council, national innovation agenda, President Obama, regional innovation center, research, UNC