Conversation Welcome

Dr. Sunil Kumar
President, Tufts University

The Hon. Deborah L. Wince-Smith
President and CEO, Council on Competitiveness

Session Overview

Opening the New England Competitiveness Conversation, Conversation Co-hosts Tufts University President Sunil Kumar and Council on Competitiveness President and CEO Deborah Wince-Smith asked why a Conversation diving into the competitiveness of New England’s blue and green economies was so important to have in this moment in time, and laid out the critical history, facts, and figures that would underpin the next two days of crucial discussions.

Key Discussion Points

Kicking off the New England Competitiveness Conversation at the Joyce Cummings Center on the campus of Tufts University, Tufts University President Sunil Kumar paid heed to Bill Cummings, husband of the Center’s namesake. Cummings grew up less than a mile from the site of the center that would one day bear his family name, a childhood marked by poverty. But, after graduating from Tufts University with a degree in economics, he found incredible success in business. Kumar pointed to Cummings’s example as proof that the American Dream is far from dead. Now more than ever, leaders have a chance and responsibility to amplify the idea that hard work and a good education can lead to success.

Council on Competitiveness President and CEO Deborah Wince-Smith, after thanking the event hosts and Council members who made the Conversation possible, shared some of the Council’s history and mission. Founded in 1986 by the “Dean” of American CEOs, John Young of Hewlett Packard, the Council is a movement comprised of CEOs, university presidents, labor leaders, and the directors of America’s major Department of Energy national laboratories, and committed to fulfilling Young’s vision of a private sector, nonpartisan leadership organization focused on American competitiveness. The Council has had a tremendous impact over the years, including designing and executing the first “clusters of innovation” studies and summits in the 1990s, as well as convening the first National Innovation Summit at MIT in 1998. The work and effort and initatives that flowed from these efforts – including the pathbreaking “Innovate America” initiative at the heart of the America Competes Act – all combined and thrust place-making innovation into the nation’s and the world’s policy spotlight.

The Council’s current flagship initiative, the National Commission on Innovation and Competitiveness Frontiers, stood up in response to two mega-trends defining the modern era. First, emerging and converging technological revolutions – AI, biotechnology, quantum, and more – are reshaping the global innovation and productivity landscape. They are also up-ending concepts of 21st century economic and national security. Second, following the end of the Cold War, a new global competition has emerged between democracy and autocracy, with the United States and China engaging as the world’s key flashpoints in a wide-ranging global competition. China is laser-focused on advancing science and technology as a means of expanding national power, co-opting, in many ways, the United States’s own innovation model to do so. China’s model of civil-military fusion means that, as its technology advances, each new capability will be deployed across economic and security domains to increase state power. As President Xi has declared, “Whoever controls AI will control the world.”

In response to these challenges, the National Commission released in 2020 Competing in the Next Economy, including recommendations that considerably shaped President Biden’s innovation agenda. In December 2024, the National Commission released an updated report, Competing in the Next Economy: Innovating in the Age of Disruption and Discontinuity – laying out 50+ strategic recommendations for the incoming President Trump administration, Congress, and regional leaders. Both these reports lay out an ambitious goal: increasing tenfold – 10X – the number of innovations developed in the United States; the speed of innovation; and the number of Americans engaged in the innovation economy.

A key finding of the National Commission has been uncovering the deep dangers associated with the hyper-concentration of the country’s innovation assets in just a handful of areas. For the United States to achieve the 10X goals, we need new innovation ecosystems emerging and engaging across the full breadth of the United States’s geography and demography. To that end, the National Commission launched the Competitiveness Conversations Across America: a series of regional summits highlighting the emerging innovation ecosystems across the country and highlighting the next and best practices they are using to succeed.

Looking back four centuries, Wince-Smith noted that New England’s blue and green economies were in the making from the moment the Pilgrims set foot on Plymouth Rock. From the clipper ships that brought the wealth of the whole world to the port of Salem, to the construction of the world’s most advanced ships in U.S. Navy shipyards, New England has been the home of the U.S. maritime industry. The nation’s blue and green economies could hardly ask for more fertile soil; in 2022, the region saw $84 billion invested in research and development, and New England as a whole ranks only behind the Pacific Northwest in patents per capita by region. This potential is nationally recognized and leveraged. For example, the region hosts four Economic Development Administration Tech Hubs designated in the region with focuses as varied as novel semiconductor designs to uses for wood products.

However, challenges remain. Workforce growth as a whole has been slower in the region than the national average, with any growth largely driven by immigrants who have not yet been fully integrated into the innovation economy. The region will need $1 billion a year for energy upgrades, despite lower demand projections than the rest of the country. And a high cost of living and less business-friendly environment are factors driving entrepreneurs to other regions of the country.