United States (US) chief technology officer Aneesh Chopra said his main target is to develop the country’s economy using the government policy to create jobs and business around technology.
He said in an interview that his job is to serve as the innovation platform champion in addressing private market opportunities in support of public priorities.
In contrast, Chopra’s emphasis reflected his working experience since 2005 as the secretary of technology for Virginia, where much of his efforts went into fostering technology companies.
By detail, Chopra’s top goal consists of four objectives, as presented recently to Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff. They four are economic growth through innovation, addressing presidential priorities through innovation platforms, building the next-generation digital infrastructure, and fostering a culture of open and innovative government.
He said mainly about the first two of these priorities, and concerning economic growth his top idea is to change the government’s view on the fund it spends on research and development. That makes sense given his position in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which plays a key role in helping allocate the government’s research expense.
Instead of purely thinking about basic research, the government should focus on investing in technologies that can be developed, he said. A first step is to find ways to actually measure how much research is being commercialized, he said further.
He said there is an implicit assumption that research and development.&D. investment will lead to job growth and economic success. “The measurement question will lead us to think about how do we begin to assess the outcomes,” he put it.
Among universities, Chopra said, there is a wide range in how effective they are in commercializing the work of their laboratories. He wants to take the practices used by the most commercial of universities and spread them to other research facilities.
Even he wants the government to create data and services that can be used by others. Taking for an example, he said video feeds from public transit systems have been incorporated into an iPhone app for commuters.
“An entrepreneur has taken government information, mashed it up with information and application value, to deliver something of value to the general public,” he said. “The work we do in government, if made more accessible to the public, could spawn new industries,” he said.
As a former management consultant, Chopra talked often about ways to quantify and evaluate various government efforts. All this is more important as President Obama has called for the country to increase public and private spending on research to 3% of the gross domestic product, from approximately 2.5% today.
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