ICT Leaders Issue Call for Action

The Computer Systems Policy Project (CSPP), an information and communications technology (ICT) advocacy organization comprised of the industry's top chief executive officers, issued a report this week calling for a more activist federal government for encouraging innovation, entrepreneurship and education in the sciences and math.

The 20-page Choose to Compete: How Innovation, Investment and Productivity Can Grow U.S. Jobs and Ensure American Competitiveness in the 21st Century is presented in three sections: performance, competitiveness and partnership. "Performance" points out the contributions information technology and telecommunications have had on America's prosperity and standard of living over the past 30 years.

"Competitiveness" presents the cold facts of a global economy. One pull-quote from the section, perhaps, sums up the reality facing the U.S. economic development community, "Americans who think that foreign workers are no match for U.S. workers in knowledge, skills and creativity are mistaken."

The final, and longest, section titled "Partnerships" lays out a three-tiered policy agenda encouraging the U.S. to cope with globalization through economic growth. CSPP calls for the following actions:

• Promoting and strengthening our innovation pipeline.
  • institute a permanent and improved federal R&D tax credit;
  • substantially increase federal spending for university-based research in the physical sciences and engineering; and,
  • debate and implement a strategic range of policies that support the entire chain of innovation.
• Encouraging investment in technologies and infrastructure that promote competitiveness and fuel entrepreneurship.
  • enact an infrastructure investment act in 2004;
  • adopt a set of national broadband goals and a strategy to reach those goals; and,
  • expand the 21st century e-government initiative.
• Improving education and training for American students and workers.
  • fund federal and state education priorities;
  • enact a math and science improvement act in 2004 to provide sufficient funding for the U.S. Department of Education's Math and Science Partnership and the National Science Foundation's Math and Science Partnership. The act also should support the development of better math and science materials and:
  • support greater access to and use of technology;
  • improve teacher preparation and performance;
  • create an incentive for human capital investment; and,
  • mitigate the temporary effects of workforce dislocations through incentives for training programs.

Choose to Compete: How Innovation, Investment and Productivity Can Grow U.S. Jobs and Ensure American Competitiveness in the 21st Century is available at www.cspp.org. CSPP is an affiliation of the CEOs of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, NCR, Unisys, Motorola, and EMC2.