Poll: U.S. residents unsure about the future of innovation

IDG News Service - About seven in 10 U.S. residents believe the next great technology entrepreneur will come from somewhere else, according to a new poll.

Asked where the next Bill Gates will come from, 29% of respondents in a new Zogby International poll said the U.S., while 28% said India, 15% said China and 11% said Japan. But the poll, released Monday, also found 67% of U.S. residents saying they believe the economic, educational and societal conditions still exist in the U.S. for another entrepreneur like the Microsoft founder to emerge.

Those answers may raise questions about the U.S. environment for innovation and entrepreneurs, said some panelists at a forum on tech innovation hosted by Zogby and 463 Communications, a Washington, D.C., public relations firm. The U.S. still has some strong factors in its favor, including a robust venture-capital market and a high-quality university system, but it also faces some challenges, said Donnie Fowler, a Democratic campaign strategist and tech entrepreneur.

But the U.S. is also losing foreign graduates of its universities to their home countries, has failed to revamp and make permanent a research and development tax credit, and has not adequately invested in all levels of education, he said. Despite those problems, the U.S. continues to have the most entrepreneurial culture in the world, he said.

"We're going to continue to lead for many, many years, but we're facing much stronger competition" from other countries, Fowler said.

Fowler encouraged U.S. lawmakers to focus on policies that can spur innovation. In some cases, the U.S. Congress in recent years has made it harder for entrepreneurs, he said. An example is the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which tightened internal controls for U.S. corporations but also made it more difficult for new companies to go public, Fowler said.

"There's lots of policy issues here," Fowler said.

The respondents of the Zogby poll, however, seemed to question U.S. lawmakers' understanding of technology. Asked whether the average 10-year-old or a member of Congress knew more about the Internet, 83% went with the 10-year-old, and only 9% sided with the lawmakers.

The U.S. could eventually lose its innovation leadership, but some critics of the U.S. government's policy on innovation seem to focus on its position relative to other countries as a zero-sum game, said Chris Caine, president and CEO of Mercator XXI, a consultancy focused on helping businesses negotiate the global economy. Innovation and growth in other countries won't necessarily hurt the U.S., he said.

While the U.S. has lacked a focus on innovation in recent years, many U.S. residents still seem to misunderstand how interdependent the U.S. economy is with the rest of the world, he said.