Earlier this week I quoted from a Business Week article that gave President Bush and Senator Kerry about even marks for supporting innovation, though it gave the edge to Bush. A couple of readers commented that such Bush policies on restricting the travel of academics coming to the U.S. from abroad and limiting stem-cell research certainly don’t promote innovation.

When I asked if anyone knew where I might find information on Bush and Kerry’s innovation-related policies, our fearless Corante leader Hylton took pity on me and sent me a link to an MIT Technology blog post , which in turn pointed to two sources for Bush and Kerry’s own words on science and innovation, one in Science magazine and one in Nature magazine.

Hylton also sent a link to a Forrester Research paper, Bush Or Kerry For An American Innovation Century? The Next President Must Ensure US Firms' Success In Global Innovation Networks, which can be downloaded free if you register.

The quick summary: Both Bush and Kerry offer “shortsighted policies that undermine…U.S. ability to compete in global Innovation Networks.”

The article is part of a series Forrester has been doing on innovation networks, which I’ve been following because of the implications for open innovation. Forrester did not invent the idea of innovation networks, though they certainly seem to be making a claim to it here. I’ll post more on innovation networks next week, but right now I want to focus on what this article says about the Presidential candidates and innovation.

According to Forrester, here’s how both candidates undermine innovation:

Religious and socially motivated policies: Bush-led restrictions on biomedical inventions will lead to an exodus of researchers from top US institutions like MIT and Harvard, turning the US into a second-class power in medical science, while Kerry's anti-offshore stance would force firms like GE and IBM to close their R&D labs in Bangalore and Shanghai, crippling their ability to invent products and services for the 2.4 billion Indian and Chinese consumers.

Declining support for “transformer” skills: Both candidates place too much emphasis on invention and not on the ability to transform inventions into innovations.

Tax incentives that fail to nurture financing of innovation: Bush proposes to make the R&D tax credit for US firms permanent but doesn't include the foreign investors who fund 15% of US R&D, while Kerry’s plan to eliminate tax on capital gains from five-year investments in startup inventors and transformers fails to take note of the fact that invention-to-innovation cycles are only two to three years, not five years.

Low funds and caution will hobble Innovation Network brokers: The Bush administration has already cut by 63% the funds for The Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), which brokers US manufacturers' access to high-tech inventions and IT-enabled transformation processes, while Kerry has promised to cancel U.S. trade agreements after a 120-day review, which will stall the major strides made over the course of many years broker groundbreaking scientific and technology alliances between U.S. firms and the world's largest innovation powerhouses.

This is not a particularly cheery assessment. If you look at this article carefully, it seems that neither candidate is seeing or defining innovation in the way that those of us who’ve been thinking, reading, writing and talking about it the last couple of years are. If they don’t know what the world of innovation even looks like these days, it’s no wonder that they both exhibit a lack of vision.

I wonder who is advising Bush and Kerry on these issues. Certainly not our government’s own National Innovation Initiative, whose head, IBM’s Sam Palmisano, is quoted in the Forrester paper: "The potential for innovation is only magnified by the emerging knowledge-based global economy [in which] innovative ideas can move around the world with the click of a mouse."

Read that, and then read the candidates' words in the Science and Nature Q&As, and it doesn’t even sound like everyone’s speaking the same language.