Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO – America’s technology leadership is at grave risk from shortsighted policies, an industry trade group warned in a report to be released Tuesday.

Economic threats, which include declining education of scientists and engineers and the underfunding of basic research by government, are well-known to executives in technology industries. But the broader public is not aware of these issues, said the report from AeA, formerly known as the American Electronics Association.

The report makes many of the same points delivered three months ago to a meeting of Chicago’s Executive Club by Edward Zander, Motorola’s chief executive.

Now that China, India, South Korea and other companies have adopted America’s market economy model, they pose a growing competitive challenge to this nation’s leadership in technologic innovation, Zander said.

“These countries have long studied America’s formula for intellectual capital creation,” Zander said, “and are now rushing to lead in this very area of innovation that has long been the source of our competitive advantage.”

While many Americans are concerned that jobs are being lost to other countries with cheap labor, the AeA report noted that this country has fallen behind in educating people who provide technical innovation.

China graduates four times as many engineers as the United States, the report said, while South Korea, with a population only one-sixth of the United States, graduates as many engineers as the United States.

“The United States is the proverbial frog in the pot of water, oblivious to the slowly rising temperature,” said the introduction to the AeA report.

Fixing the problem will take years and focused effort, the report said, but it can be done. Americans have regained slipping technologic superiority twice in two generations.

Once was in the late 1950s after the Soviet Union shocked the world by launching Sputnik, when the United States was unable to launch its own space satellite. The country was shocked again in the 1980s when Japan began to dominate the manufacture of television sets and automobiles.

America’s current lagging technologic leadership is less dramatic and less noticed, said Van Cullens, chief of Westell Technologies Inc., an Aurora, Ill.-based telecom equipment firm.

“In the past we could focus on the Soviets and on Japan,” said Cullens. “But we don’t have that focus now. There’s China, but there’s also India and even Brazil. It’s much more diffused.”

Cullens said that he and other industry executives have made their case to Washington politicians, but not much action has been taken. As Zander noted in his speech, the topic never surfaced as an issue in the last election.

“As long as the public remains unconcerned, politicians don’t see any benefit to attacking this problem,” Cullens said.

Michael Birck, chairman of Tellabs Inc., the Naperville, Ill.-based telecom equipment firm, said that as a trustee of Purdue University, he is very familiar with the problem.

“Our education system isn’t in very good shape,” he said. “It’s especially poor in math and science. Kids don’t come to college well prepared in math and science, partly because the emphasis hasn’t been there for them to be interested in that.”

The AeA report contains four pages of recommendations to address the problem. They range from lowering barriers for immigration of highly skilled people to supporting education reforms and boosting federal funds for basic research.

“This approaching crisis did not sneak up on us overnight,” the report concluded. “It has evolved over the past decade and a half. If we hope to continue as the world’s leading science and technology economy, we need to act now.”