cover image Advantage: How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge

Advantage: How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge

Adam Segal, Norton, $26.95 (288p) ISBN 978-0-393-06878-8

Only a few hundred Chinese received doctorates at Chinese universities in 1987; two decades later, China could boast "36,247 doctoral students, approximately 63 percent with degrees in science and engineering." Segal, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, examines Asia's prodigious boom in education and entrepreneurship, and how its progress is hindered by bureaucracy and overregulation (India) and state control and a lack of transparency (China). Segal shows how America can meet the Asian challenge with such specific recommendations as increasing the number of H1-B visas for skilled foreign workers and other prescriptions that prove more vague: a call for more "collaborative communities of scientists and entrepreneurs." Still this lucid, stimulating analysis shows why America's open, multicultural society can make a significant contribution to innovation in the decades to come, even though Asian countries will continue to gain influence and the U.S. will never again enjoy the scientific and technological dominance it enjoyed following WWII. Segal concludes on a guardedly (and welcome) optimistic note: with more attention paid to fostering and funding ecosystems of scientific research, the U.S. can "prosper and play a dynamic role in the new world of globalized innovation." (Jan.)