One more reason doing more of the same won’t work

From Matt Steinglass via Andrew Sullivan talking about a new Chinese version of the Blackberry that is cheaper and better than the original:

The example of the Chinese knockoff Blackberry suggests that maybe US innovators aren’t doing anything wrong. It’s just that they’re now competing against Chinese innovators, where they weren’t 10 years ago. This may have happened for two reasons. The first is that lack of intellectual property protection, combined with the outsourcing of manufacturing for all those high-tech products to China, gradually destroyed the US’s technological edge. The second is that in 1998, China didn’t have very many top-flight engineers. But they’ve spent the last 10 years doing nothing but graduate engineers, and now, they do. And that changes everything.

And from an article in Business Week:

The US ran a $30 billion trade surplus in advanced tech in 1998. By 2007 it was a $53 billion deficit.

And yet I still routinely get asked whether we really need to do anything different in our schools to compete in foreign markets. Because even if what we were doing 10 years ago was enough–which clearly it wasn’t–the competition is getting harder every year, not easier.