The Technology Leadership and Strategy Initiative (TLSI), established in 2009, is a dialogue among the country’s foremost science and technology leaders aiming to enhance U.S. innovation and technology capabilities critical for national security and economic competitiveness. As part of the Council on Competitiveness, the TLSI unites nearly 50 Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) from technology intensive businesses, universities, and the U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories. This coalition of cross-sector collaborators identifies strategic technologies and grand challenges, develops pathways for building more productive research partnerships across, and advances policies to speed new products to market.
The TLSI Dialogues have focused over the past two years on a specific mission: to deliver strategic recommendations for policymakers and influencers that will modernize the U.S. industrial base and equip it for the shifting landscape of innovation and global competition. To that end, TLSI Dialogues 27-31, guided by the TLSI’s distinguished co-chairs—the Hon. Patricia Falcone, Deputy Director at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory; Dr. Sally Morton, Executive Vice President of Knowledge Enterprise at Arizona State University; and Dr. Steven H. Walker, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Lockheed Martin—fostered vigorous exchanges of ideas and insights focused on the challenges facing the U.S. defense industrial base, the broader innovation ecosystem, and the Trump Administration’s national priorities for U.S. competitiveness in science and technology. It is from these foundational discussions that the Compact for America has emerged.
The Compact for America features ten actionable recommendations designed to modernize the United States’ innovation ecosystem and enhance the country’s technological capability and capacity. These measures are intended to strengthen the defense industrial base (DIB) and foster a stronger, broader innovation-driven economy, ultimately reinforcing both economic and national security for all Americans. The Compact aims to ensure sustained technological leadership in an increasingly competitive global landscape. These ten recommendations are organized under four pillars, including:
Critical technologies face challenges during the scaling process, which is significant because global competitors can leverage stolen U.S. intellectual property to advance their own technological capabilities with extraordinary speed. The United States must expedite the maturation and commercialization of technology by incentivizing rapid technology translation from innovation to the marketplace or battlefield, as well as remove barriers that stand in the way of this goal.
Today, innovation and new technologies critical to achieving national security objectives primarily reside in commercial enterprises. To capture this value—in addition to the supportive directives included in President Trump’s “Modernizing Defense Acquisitions and Spurring Innovation in the Defense Industrial Base” Executive Order— the Department of Defense (DoD) can strengthen the defense industrial base (DIB) by: incentivizing the development of dual-use technologies (that is, technologies that can be used for civilian and military purposes); broadening competition to include a wider range of participants in the DIB; and fostering collaboration between commercial sectors, defense entities, academia, venture capital, and other stakeholders that drive the innovation economy.
The United States and its allies face challenges in leveraging each other’s specialized strengths, which hampers their ability to compete against global competitors who can quickly share or steal critical intellectual property. To strengthen U.S. tech leadership, it is critical to regain influence in global standards-setting bodies, address significant security gaps in protecting intellectual property, and enhance collaboration for joint research with close allies.
The U.S. science and technology enterprise is not fielding a full team. To effectively compete with China and India, which have many times larger populations, the United States must expand the number of individuals and communities contributing to and benefiting from the innovation economy. This will require partnerships across industry, universities, and all levels of government, as well as place-making initiatives—that is, the intentional, strategic creation of an investment, research, and policy ecosystem that makes a place come to life with a vigorous, vibrant, and innovation-driven economy.
Before providing specific, actionable recommendations for each of these four pillars, this report provides greater context of the modern, dynamic innovation and technology landscape.
