I’ve known Mike Sekora for probably 30 years. He is one of those extremely bright people that the mainstream political process just don’t listen to. Mike has asked me to repost these two blogs of his:
- When Will We Stop Blindly Pissing Away Money Down the R&D Rat Hole?
- Harvard Business Review: Candid Arrogance or Just Plain Stupidity
The point I take away is that merely spending money on R&D does not guarantee American competitiveness. The ideas that result from that research must be commercialized. This is the absolute key to any genuine American economic revival.
Michael Sekora was founder and director of Project Socrates, the intelligence community program that used all-source intelligence to determine the underlying cause of America’s declining competitiveness and to develop the means to not just reverse the decline, but to ensure that the US remained strong economically for many generations. The cause of the decline was US decision-makers abandoning technology-based planning and adopting economic-based planning at the end of WWII. To rebuild US competitiveness, Sekora led the Project Socrates team in the development of the means to enable the US to generate and lead the next evolutionary leap in technology-based planning–the Automated Innovation revolution. The Socrates Automated Innovation system enables technology to be acquired and utilized (to include R&D), with unprecedented speed, efficiency and agility to generate and maintain the required competitive advantage. Today, Mr. Sekora focuses on “Operation U.S. Forward” which is presently implementing the structure to deploy a fully updated, enhanced version of the Socrates Automated Innovation system as a nation-wide planning asset in the US and in selected allied countries.
