Technology and Competitiveness
In 1983 a classified program was initiated in the US intelligence community to reverse the US declining economic and military competitiveness. The program, Project Socrates, used all source intelligence to review competitiveness worldwide for all forms of competition to determine the source of the US decline. What Project Socrates determined was that technology exploitation is the foundation of all competitive advantage and that the source of the US declining competitiveness was the fact that decision-making through the US both in the private and public sectors had switched from decision making that was based on technology exploitation (i.e., technology-based planning) to decision making that was based on money exploitation (i.e., economic-based planning) at the end of World War II.
Technology is properly defined as any application of science to accomplish a function. The science can be leading edge or well established and the function can have high visibility or be significantly more mundane but it is all technology, and its exploitation is the foundation of all competitive advantage.
Technology-based planning is what was used to build the US industrial giants before WWII (e.g., Dow, DuPont, GM) and it what was used to transform the US into a superpower. It was not economic-based planning.
Project Socrates determined that to rebuild US competitiveness, decision making throughout the US had to readopt technology-based planning. Project Socrates also determined that countries like China and India had continued executing technology-based (while the US took its detour into economic-based) planning, and as a result had considerable advanced the process and were using it to build themselves into superpowers. To rebuild US competitiveness the US decision-makers needed adopt a form of technology-based planning that was far more advanced than that used by China and India.
Project Socrates determined that technology-based planning makes an evolutionary leap forward every few hundred years and the next evolutionary leap, the Automated Innovation Revolution, was poised to occur. In the Automated Innovation Revolution the process for determining how to acquire and utilize technology for a competitive advantage (which includes R&D) is automated so that it can be executed with unprecedented speed, efficiency and agility.
Project Socrates developed the means for automated innovation so that the US could lead the Automated Innovation Revolution in order to rebuild and maintain the country's economic competitiveness for many generations.
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Famous quotes containing the word technology:
“If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamics that present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)