Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, October 14, 1993                   TAG: 9403170014
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A15   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: HARVEY BROOKS and JOHN S. FOSTER JR.
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TECHNOLOGY

The Clinton administration is right: Technology is the major driving force for the expansion of the U.S. economy. New technologies have accounted for more than half of the per-person increases in productivity since the Great Depression.

Furthermore, many industries are becoming more technology intensive. Companies rely increasingly on scientific knowledge and intensive engineering for competitive advantage.

These trends should be advantageous to the United States. This country has led the world in the development and use of technology for decades. It also continues to have important strengths, including a world-leading basic research enterprise; a large, affluent and sophisticated domestic market; and an unrivaled record of spawning new technology-intensive companies and industries.

But changes both here and abroad have reduced our ability to profit from these strengths. New systems of production perfected and deployed largely in other countries, going by such names as "flexible manufacturing" and "lean production," have proved markedly superior to the mass-production paradigm that still dominates American industry.

In the work force, the weakness of America's job-related training and continuing education, especially of shop-floor workers, has reduced the ability of American companies to exploit new technologies competitively. At the same time, outmoded managerial strategies make it difficult to take advantage of the skills of better-trained workers.

Responsibility for meeting these challenges lies principally with private companies operating in competitive markets. Yet both state and federal governments have essential roles to play in stimulating more effective development and use of technology throughout the economy.

For this to happen, a fundamental shift of perspective must take place, especially at the federal level. In the past, the federal government has generally restricted its support of technologies to those that contributed directly to federal missions such as defense, space expIoration, the cure of disease, and food production - and by and large these efforts were successful. However, now it must learn how to foster the use and development of technology explicitly to boost economic performance.

This is unfamiliar territory for the federal government and will require considerable experimentation and learning. It will have to work with market forces much more than in the past.

We recently co-chaired a National Academy of Engineering committee that laid out several steps government should take. First, it must recognize that the major problem is less a lack of available new technologies than it is an ability to exploit new technologies effectively.

The government therefore needs to establish a technology outreach service to help meet the needs of private industry. To improve the skills of the American work force, it needs to work with states and localities to improve school-to-work transition programs and job-related training, emphasizing the capacity to learn new skills.

The federal government should also support more directly those technologies that are expected to yield especially high returns to U.S. society. Such programs should be structured so they can be carefully evaluated and terminated if they are not achieving their goals.

The federal government also needs to help companies meet both the competitive threats and the opportunities from technologies being developed in other countries. Foreign technologies are now every bit as important as home-grown ones, and increasingly sophisticated markets abroad offer valuable new sources of economic expansion.

The Clinton administration has embraced most of these recommendations. In doing so, it has demonstrated its recognition of technology's importance to America's future.

At the same time, the urgency of action should not tempt the administration into adopting too much of a "top-down" approach. Ways of soliciting continuing ideas and inputs from the private sector need to be institutionalized.

Even if all these steps were adopted, the U.S. economy would not turn around overnight. Improving the development and use of technology in this country is a long-term goal that will demand political courage and sustained commitment over a long period.

Harvey Brooks is professor emeritus at Harvard University and a member of the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering and of the Institute of Medicine. John S. Foster Jr. is chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Science Board and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.