Emily Stover DeRocco Speech
Indiana Biotechnology Education Conference
Indianapolis, IN
February 17, 2005
Good afternoon and thank you, Dr. Lang, for your invitation to this event. I am excited about what Indiana is doing in health care and biotech and I am honored to speak to so many of the industry’s leaders today.
And thank you, Carol. It’s nice to see you again. Carol was my counterpart at the Department of Education for the first several years of the Administration. I miss her. You all are very lucky to have her back in Indiana.
I’d like to begin today by talking a little about the economy on a macro level.
This is an incredibly exciting time for our country. Technology and globalization are presenting us with vast opportunities and great challenges. Some of our oldest and most dependable industries are transforming or disappearing entirely while new, almost futuristic industries are bursting onto the economic landscape.
In the 21st century economy, the competition can come from the company across the street – or across the ocean. Someone, somewhere on the globe will always be able to produce existing goods or provide standardized services at a cheaper price, but only the United States has possessed the freedom and resources and talent to continuously discover and produce “the next big thing.” Today however, there are competitors on the horizon.
- Foreign-owned companies and foreign-born individuals now account for nearly half of all U.S. patents.
- In 2003, China overtook the United States as the world leader in direct foreign investment.
- And today, Asian countries now spend as much on nanotechnology as the United States.
It’s no wonder then that in a major report issued last month, the non-partisan Council on Competitiveness concluded that innovation is the single biggest factor influencing America’s future economic success. If we are to remain the world’s leading economy and successfully compete with growing Asian competitors, we must transform to an innovation economy.
As much as we might need to innovate though, it doesn’t happen by formula or fiat. The innovation economy is fundamentally different from the industrial or even the information economy. It requires a new vision, new approach and new action agenda.
The United States must create the conditions that will stimulate individuals and enterprises to innovate and take the lead in the next generation of knowledge creation, technologies, business models and dynamic management systems. A new relationship among companies, government, educators and workers is needed to assure a 21st century economic environment that can successfully adapt and compete with global challenges.
This new vision will require new focus on three key areas: Infrastructure, Investment, and Talent. I will leave infrastructure and investment to another day with my colleagues at Commerce and Treasury while today focusing on talent.
Nearly three years ago, President Bush identified the resources of our public workforce system as a potentially critical asset to the new economy. With 3,500 nationwide offices, $15 billion in annual resources, and access to human capital, the system was at a clear advantage. However, the system was built on and continued to operate on a social service model and that model was marginalizing its use and relevance to communities’, states’ and the nations’ economic development strategy.
So, President Bush created the High Growth Job Training Initiative to identify those areas of the economy most in need of talent and develop ways to meet that demand. It took us at the Labor Department no more than a casual glance to realize that biotechnology was a high growth industry that we must focus on. In the last ten years, the industry quadrupled in size and over the next five years, it is expected to add over 100,000 new jobs.
Not only is biotechnology a high growth industry, it was also one of the first industries in our emerging innovation economy. Its array of hybrid sub-sectors such as biomanufacturing, biomedics and bioinformatics reflect an improvement and advancement of existing industries and an originality that is the hallmark of innovation.
So we began the High Growth Initiative process by gathering as much information as we could on the biotech industry. After developing a baseline understanding, we held a series of meetings around the country with corporate and association executives to identify the major workforce challenges facing the industry. What we found, more so than in any other industry, was an interdependent set of issues.
First, industry leaders said there was an image problem for the industry. Now, considering that all twelve sectors that we studied identified image as a problem, this should not have come as a surprise. It was the reasons why that were interesting.
In the mature industries like construction, health care, and retail, consumers and job-seekers know the industry “of the past” well and have developed some clear negative perceptions about jobs in those fields. And in the yet-to-emerge industries like geospatial and nano-technology, few people have heard of them much less formed an opinion about what it is like to work in the industry. But biotech is different.
Having been around and in the news and media for a decade now, the public has developed just enough knowledge to be dangerous, as they say. “Biotechnology is how they genetically engineer food.” “Biotech is responsible for all those new drugs that cost so much.” And finally, “you need to be a doctor or scientist or both to work in biotechnology. I could never find a job or develop a career in biotech.”
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