The United States ingenuity – the source (2)

ImmigrationThe US is a land of immigrants. As such, the country is much more receptive to people coming from other countries, especially those that come with new ideas, potentials, and energy. It even appears that the best people from other countries somehow find their way to the US and, unlike in most other countries of […]

Immigration
The US is a land of immigrants. As such, the country is much more receptive to people coming from other countries, especially those that come with new ideas, potentials, and energy. It even appears that the best people from other countries somehow find their way to the US and, unlike in most other countries of the world, there is significant upward mobility for immigrants in the US. For example, Google was founded by recent immigrants. The relative openness of the US to foreigners, which is manifested in the numerous fairly convenient routes of obtaining permanent residency, also equates to openness to new ideas. Moreover, immigration laws in the US favor skilled people, and there is even a special category for “aliens of exceptional ability.” One strange aspect of immigration is the fact that, because people are of different blood lines, formal “cut-and-dry” relationships can be more easily established. This, worrisomely, I must say, seems to enhance business performance.
The schools
As pointed out in the penultimate article, American tertiary institutions are the best. There are several reasons for this. One is the demand of the tenure system, which forces professors in science and engineering disciplines to have highly established track records of original research contributions and attract a sizeable amount of money to their institutions by virtue of their research. Student evaluations of professors also help the quality control in the institutions. Moreover, students’ demands may not be very explicit, independent of the questionnaires that the institutions have drawn up for evaluation. You are also dealing with students most of whom have been brought up in the American capitalist and cultural way, which I discussed fairly extensively in last week’s article.
American students demand for absolute understanding of the materials that they are thought. In engineering, they get into the bottom of how things work, and are more likely to be hands-on compared to students from other countries. I remember my own experience as an undergraduate student in the Faculty of Engineering in a Nigerian university. Of course, we did not have student evaluation of teachers. Moreover, students tended to cheer and speak more positively and admirably of lecturers who came in to class and filled the board with complicated equations, which invariably the students did not know how to apply to design rate or rate an engineering system or component. On the other hand, American students demand almost a perfect understanding, to the point where they can apply what they learn. Design competitions in American engineering schools provide avenues for American hands-on students to reinforce what is taught in class.
Government funding of research
By now, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the United States spends the most money on research funding of all countries of the world, to the tune of $405 billion in 2011, representing approximately 2.7% of the country’s GDP. The corresponding figures for China are quite impressive at $300 billion and 1.98%, a testament to China’s aggressiveness in becoming relevant on the global research scene. The Research and Development (R&D) spending data has been taken from a Wikipedia entry.
Of the 72 countries that show up on the global ranking of R&D funding, only a handful of African countries made the list: South Africa ($3.7 billion), Egypt ($910 million), Morocco ($760 million), Tunisia ($660 million), Sudan ($180 million), Algeria ($160 million), Uganda ($130 million), Botswana ($110 million), and Ethiopia ($10 million). Conspicuously absent in the table is Nigeria, with its position as one of the richest countries in Africa. This implies that, unlike countries like Botswana, Ethiopia, Sudan, and Uganda, Nigeria as a nation probably does not have a budget for R&D. Obviously this situation has to change if Nigeria is to become a force to be reckoned with in future Africa.
So, what does research funding buy? Let’s consider the US as an example. There are numerous avenues that the US government employs to fund researchers in universities and industry. Examples include the National Science Foundation, the National Research Council, The National Institute of Health, and funding provided by the Department of Energy, the various Department of Defense (DoD) Components (Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – DARPA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).  There are also government programs with the sole mandate to provide funding to small business that are capable of carrying out innovative research, with or without collaborations with universities. These programs are called Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR).
Many high-tech products in use today are outcomes of research activities that were funded by the US Department of Defense (DoD) or NASA. Examples include cell phones (NASA), Internet (DoD), and GPS (DoD).
Finally, leading American companies, such as Apple, AT&T, IBM, HP, Kodak, Microsoft, Intel, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, General Electric, General Dynamics, etc., are also innovation houses.  
The main idea in the series of three articles on US ingenuity is to show that the US leads the world in innovation and the quality of the tertiary educational institutions, and to suggest several factors that are responsible for this event. These factors include American capitalism, culture, the attractive innovation environment, the existence of highly efficient systems, immigration, the educational system, extensive government funding of basic, applied, specialized, and high-risk research.