The webcast of the National Innovation Initiative Summit, held Dec. 15, 2004, has finally been archived. View it here. I've had a chance now to read the full report (download .PDF here), and it's much, much better than I expected. It's thoughtful and well-written, in a way that I would not have expected from a committee, especially not a government-sponsored one!
The news coverage on this has been paltry so far, mostly focused on the report's recommendations about increasing federal funding of high-risk R&D projects and overhauling the K-12 education system to encourage innovation.
Yet there is much more here. Start with the NII's working definition of innovation: "The intersection of invention and insight, leading to the creation of social and economic value." If all that was to come out of this project was a recommendation for greater R&D tech spending, there wouldn't be any need to begin with as broad a definition as this.
As the definition suggests, this report explores how America has practiced innovation in the past, suggests that innovation has been the driver for the rise of the American economy, explores the recent major shifts in "where, how and why" innovation occurs, and offers recommendations for how we can "focus as a society on what we do best [innovate]. "
It's probably not surprising that I would find this idea -- that innovation has been what drives America -- fascinating, considering my interest in what drives innovation itself. I'll spend part of January discussing this report in more detail.
Meanwhile, Happy New Year to everyone!
Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is 
1. Paul Hobcraft on January 7, 2005 11:02 PM writes...
Like you I was waiting with interest on the NII report that was released in December 2004
It lays out some policy decisions that hopefully will be implemented and adopted for US policy, across Business, Government and Education to accelerate and promote innovation.
One comment though:
I felt excited when I first read the interim report a number of months back. It had more aspirations, more intent. It seemed more 'connected' with the 'struggles' of today in innovation and seemed to lay out more of a promise of a high level group combining forces together to place innovation on a higher plain- to give it some breakthrough thinking. The promise of all that 'collective wisdom' to come together based on different commitee themes I felt might give innovation that real breakthrough that it most probably needs to become "the single most important factor in determining America's success through the 21st centure". Something got lost along the way to the final report. It is a pity.
It gave an interesting anaylsis of a large set of problems that needed to be addressed and some sound recommendations to be implemented
This excitement I felt has somehow been lost in the final report. It seems, from my view, that this "essence" has not got to the final report, its been boiled down, possibly abandoned and maybe, through the size of the co-ordinating task and the need to consider so much conflicting, diverse and vested opinion it became more incremental, perhaps more realisistic, so we have ended up with a solid, dependable, sometimes predictable report. It partly identifies and recommend ways to clear current road blocks and suggests a range of fresh incentives but may not have achieve what I felt might have been a ground breaking report.
Perhaps it is too much to ask from such a collection of views but something just seemed to have got lost between aspiration and realization but innovation does need the 'bigger vision' and I was hoping the final report might give us more of this.
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