BIF Founder Saul Kaplan Sounds Off in Business Week
BIF Founder and Chief Catalyst Saul Kaplan was recently invited by Business Week to pen an article outlining his thoughts on our country’s need to create a national innovation agenda. In this piece, Kaplan discusses the perils of using stimulus cash simply to shore up outmoded education and health-care systems, rather than take the bold steps needed to transform our economy and social systems.
Needed: A National Innovation Agenda
By Saul Kaplan
In the coming months, our government is going to throw a lot of money at some very big problems. The amount is staggering—a $787 billion stimulus package combined with a proposed $3.6 trillion federal budget. That kind of market-making money should be able to drive the bold changes we need in health care and education.
I fear it will not.
It would be a shame if the nation's palpable hunger for fresh ideas and approaches resulted only in incremental change. The problem I see is that most of the money is about to travel through existing pipes to sustain the way the health-care and education industries currently operate. This path simply maintains the status quo.
If we want bold change, we have to allocate more of the federal investment to the design and testing of new approaches that are not constrained by existing ones.
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