Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

STATEMENTS ON INTRODUCED BILLS AND JOINT RESOLUTIONS -- (Senate - June 03, 2008)

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

By Ms. COLLINS (for herself and Mrs. Clinton):

S. 3078. A bill to establish a National Innovation Council, to improve the coordination of innovation activities among industries in the United States, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.

Ms. COLLINS. Mr. President, I rise today to introduce the National Innovation and Job Creation Act, a bill which aims to spur the adoption of new technologies and practices that can accelerate economic growth and build a secure foundation for good, high-paying jobs. I am pleased that Senator Clinton joins me in offering this legislation.

We are all familiar with the fiscal challenges our Nation will face in the coming years. Over the next 2 decades, more than 75 million members of the Baby Boom generation will leave the workforce and enter retirement. The loss of their participation in the workforce, coupled with our Social Security obligations and rising healthcare costs, will put enormous strains on our economy. So too will competition from other countries, brought about by increased international trade and globalization. If we do not act to strengthen our competitiveness, our nation's ability to create good, high-paying jobs will be severely tested.

Indeed, there are already troubling signs that our economy's competitive edge has been dulled, and we are losing ground to other nations. In just the last 4 months, we've seen 340,000 jobs lost across the country. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 1.6 million more workers unemployed today than in 2001, and 800,000 more workers unemployed than just one year ago. Our trade deficit is now 6.5 percent of GDP--the highest in history--while manufacturing continues its decades-long decline, accounting for only 12.1 percent of GDP in 2006. We now import more high-technology products than we sell to other nations, and even in agriculture, where America has long been the world leader, our trade surplus is dropping toward zero.

Even the service sector is not immune from the effects of international competition. With the increased telecommunications capacity provided by trans-oceanic fiber-optic networks, geographic proximity to the market is no longer necessary for services such as back-office operations, call-centers, and software development.

As the Brookings Institute pointed out in a series of recent white papers on the topic of Innovation, ``the growth of international trade and the globalization of production make it increasingly important for the United States to innovate to maintain its standard of living.'' They explain that low-wage countries will always find it easier to compete with America for labor-intensive work that is difficult-to-automate, but that does not mean that we must surrender whole industries to China and India, nor does it mean that we must fear the inevitable loss of high value-added jobs that depend upon research and development, and advanced technology.

Rather, it means that we must build upon what has always given America its competitive edge--innovation. This means taking what has already been invented, and putting it to use. It is only by doing this that we can raise our productivity rate, and ultimately, continue to create the high-paying jobs that Americans need and deserve.

Last year, with the passage of the America COMPETES Act, we took an important step toward bolstering research and education that can serve as the foundation for future innovation. But we must go beyond this, to help enterprises understand innovative technologies and services that can make them more competitive, and to help them overcome the barriers they face in adopting these innovations.

That is what the bill Senator Clinton and I are introducing today aims to do. The bill creates a National Innovation Council in the Executive Office of the President, to take the lead in coordinating existing Federal efforts on innovation, and to help support those efforts at the State and local level. Six Federal programs that share innovation-based missions would be relocated to the NIC. These are: The Manufacturing Extension Partnership Program (the ``MEP''), the Technology Innovation Program, Partnerships for Innovation, the Industry-University Cooperative Research Center Program, the Engineering Research Center Program, and the Workforce Innovations in Regional Economic Development program, known as the ``WIRED'' program.

The operation and funding of these existing programs would be unaltered by my legislation, but the NIC would lead these programs to coordinate their activities where feasible.

The NIC would operate several grant programs to support efforts to spread innovation and create good jobs. Chief among these would be a grant program to support innovation-based economic development partnerships in every State. The NIC would also provide grants for the diffusion of technology in every state, operating through the existing MEP program.

The NIC would also oversee a new ``Cluster Development'' program which would operate alongside the six existing programs I have already mentioned. I want to focus for a moment on this aspect of my proposal since cluster development is so essential to our ability to keep and create good, high-paying jobs in the face of international competition.

``Clusters'' are geographic areas where interrelated economic activity is taking place. Businesses that locate in a cluster build the foundation they all rely on to succeed, even as they compete with one another. Because of this, clusters are often at the heart of strong regional economies. Silicon Valley in California, Route 128 around Boston, and the Research Triangle Park in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, are famous examples of clusters in the high-tech sector. But cluster development is not just a phenomenon of the high-tech industry--successful clusters can and do arise in any sector of the economy. Think insurance in Connecticut, theme parks in Florida, movies in Hollywood, and boatbuilding in Maine. Each of these ``clusters'' is built around a skilled labor force that can command good wages, and is ready to compete with the best the world has to offer.

In Maine, cluster development has been championed by Karen Mills, the primary author of the Brookings Institute's white paper ``Clusters and Competitiveness.'' From her work in helping Maine secure $15 million in WIRED funding to further develop the composite and boatbuilding clusters in a project that hopes to create 2,500 high-quality jobs over the next 5 to 7 years, to her current position as chair of Maine's Council on Competitiveness and the Economy, Karen's hard work and dedication on cluster development is unsurpassed.

The WIRED grant has enabled Maine to make great progress on cluster development, but more must be done nationally. As Karen explained in the Brookings white paper, our Nation's network of cluster initiatives is ``thin and uneven,'' and consequently ``many U.S. industry clusters are not as competitive as they could be, to the detriment of the nation's capacity to sustain well-paying jobs.'' Because of this, ``too many workers are losing decent jobs, and too many regions are struggling economically.''

The Cluster Development program we are proposing in this bill is modeled after the Department of Labor's WIRED program. It would identify geographic regions where cluster activity is taking place or can develop, and provide assistance to local and regional efforts to build on those clusters.

I look forward to working with my colleagues on this and other proposals to bolster innovation, strengthen our Nation's competitiveness, and most of all, help preserve the foundation for high-quality jobs in the face of the coming economic challenges.

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