How Science Can Create Millions of New Jobs

Reigniting basic research can repair the broken U.S. business model and put Americans back to work

By Adrian Slywotzky

Name an industry that can produce 1 million new, high-paying jobs over the next three years. You can't, because there isn't one. And that's the problem.

America needs good jobs, soon. We need 6.7 million just to replace losses from the current recession, then an additional 10 million to keep up with population growth and to spark demand over the next decade. In the 1990s the U.S. economy created a net 22 million jobs, or 2.2 million a year. But from 2000 to the end of 2007, the rate plunged to 900,000 a year. The pipeline is dry because the U.S. business model is broken. Our growth engine has run out of a key fuel—basic research.

The U.S. infrastructure for scientific innovation has historically consisted of a loose public-private partnership. It included legendary institutions such as Bell Labs, RCA Labs, Xerox (XRX) PARC, and the research operations of IBM (IBM), along with NASA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and others. In each of these organizations, programs with clear commercial potential were supported alongside pure research. There was ample corporate and venture capital funding for commercialization, so the labs were able to make enormous contributions to science, technology, and the economy—including the creation of millions of high-paying jobs.

Consider a few milestones from Bell Labs: Fax transmission, long-distance television transmission, photovoltaic solar cells, the transistor, the UNIX operating system, and cellular telephony. Each of these innovations laid the groundwork for vibrant new industries. The transistor alone is the building block for computers, consumer electronics, telecom systems, high-tech medical devices, and much more. Likewise, DARPA's creation of the Internet (as ARPAnet) in 1969 and Xerox PARC's development of Ethernet and the graphical user interface (GUI) set the stage for the PC revolution. These basic research breakthroughs unleashed cycles of applied innovation that created entirely new sectors of our economy.

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has been less than a success.