Welcome

Session Overview

Chad Evans, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the Council on Competitiveness, opened the Mountain West Competitiveness Conversation by highlighting the Council's vital role in fostering U.S. innovation since its founding in 1986. From establishing the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award to advocating for the CHIPS and Science Act, the Council has consistently expanded the innovation economy to more places and people. With the launch of Competitiveness Conversations Across America, it is continuing this effort, engaging more regions in the innovation economy by identifying best — and next — practices and, through the Council's flagship National Commission on Innovation and Competitiveness Frontiers, replicating them in communities and regions across the country. In his opening remarks, Mr. Evans also stressed the need for the United States to adapt to the complexities of the 21st century, particularly through advancements in quantum science and climate resilience, positioning the Mountain West as a key player in this transformation.

Key Session Insights

To begin the Mountain West Competitiveness Conversation, Council on Competitiveness Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Chad Evansgave participants an overview of the Council on Competitiveness’s history as a voice for innovation and a more competitive United States. Founded in 1986 by then Hewlett-Packard CEO John Young as a continuation of President Reagan’s Commission on Industrial Competitiveness, the Council is a leading nonpartisan force in Washington championing policy that bolsters the United States’s scientific and technological competitiveness.

 The Council collaborates with over 200 members — including business CEOs, university presidents, labor union leaders, and directors of U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories — to ensure the United States leads the world in productivity, innovation, security, and prosperity. For example, the Council:

• Helped create the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, recognizing the companies, nonprofits, and individuals leading the nation towards higher standards of performance and quality.
• Advocated for the 2007 America Competes Act, a seminal piece of policy, which made a generational commitment to investment in science and technology as a means of supercharging U.S. innovation and productivity.
• Led the formation of the National Digital Engineering and Manufacturing Consortium, helping train small and medium-sized manufacturers in the use of cutting-edge digital technologies to aid in design and manufacturing and leverage Department of Commerce support to bring the whole industrial economy into the digital age.
• Helped shape the landmark CHIPS and Science Act to reshore the manufacturing of critical technologies like semiconductors and invest in the country’s national innovation infrastructure to make it competitive in this new age of global technology-based competition.

Shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, the Council stood up its flagship “National Commission on Innovation and Competitiveness Frontiers” (Commission) to better understand the increasingly turbulent global competitiveness ecosystem and develop recommendations to drive major expansion in the United States’s ability to innovate at speed and scale.

Two mega-trends drove the creation of the Commission:

1. The confluence of transformational technologies like AI, biotechnology, and quantum computing — each co-evolving and building on each other, and
2. The rapid expansion of global competitiveness challengers, most notably China.

The Commission made a key recognition early in its work related to a fundamental risk to U.S. competitiveness, which is that not enough places and people are engaging in the innovation economy in the United States, handicapping U.S. innovation capacity and capability. The Council began the Competitiveness Conversations Across America to seek out the places in the United States outside of the coasts where new innovation ecosystems are emerging — learning from the best — and next — practices being deployed in these regions, and elevating those lessons for national scale up.

To conclude, Mr. Evans made clear that, while the Vannevar Bush “Endless Frontier” framework of centralized and federally funded science had taken the United States far, it is no longer a sufficient model. In the fast-paced, non-linear innovation and competitiveness environment of the 21st century, the nation needs to be ready to harness inevitable disruption and discontinuity. Only by doing so can the United States hope to continue leading the world in technological progress for the next century, as it has in the past one.

Critical to the United States setting the global technology pace are the efforts unfurling in the Mountain West to innovate in quantum science and sustainable technologies, two industries of immense global competition, and that will help determine the global winners and losers of the next economy. Fortunately, the Mountain West’s growing innovation ecosystem — featuring eight R1 universities, the Colorado-Wyoming Climate NSF Engine and Elevate Quantum Economic Development Tech Hub, growing start-up community, a large and growing presence of Fortunte 500 tech companies, an established national laboratory footprint, and other important factors — is helping position the United States as the leader in these fields.