SUMMARY

Launched in 2023, IST organized this particular SBI effort into separate working groups on three key technologies: biotech, energy, and quantum—each composed of public- and private-sector experts and stakeholders in those respective fields. Over the research period, each working group convened three times, building and iterating from the previous work and generating concept papers after each round. The process will culminate in a final gathering of input from a plenary convening and then a comprehensive analytical synthesis and set of actionable recommendations for public-private collaboration. 

The February 2024 paper, Unlocking U.S. Technological Competitiveness: Public-Private Misalignments in Biotechnology, Energy, and Quantum Sectors summarized the first round of discussions and research, which identified and explored a selection of the most significant misalignments. The March 2024 paper, Unlocking U.S. Technological Competitiveness: Evaluating Initial Solutions to Public-Private Misalignments, explored potential solutions to those most significant concerns—capturing both what was revealed in the second round of discussions and the research that the SBI team performed on those options. 

This concept paper, the third and last working paper in the series, lays out how a third round of working group meetings further explored those initial solutions, building out specific ways to operationalize them, identifying specific questions that need to be addressed to achieve these goals, and suggesting potential mechanisms for achieving them. Each sector-specific section explores what was newly identified in this third round of work and conducts a “deep dive” into how to unlock biotech, energy, and quantum progress, respectively. In short, IST suggests that the U.S. government set up a new biotech data repository, provide a demand-side mandate for green energy, and facilitate a mapping of the quantum sector. These proposals would address the misalignments we found most pressing—as identified in the first paper—and reflect IST’s recommendations for how to be most impactful, including the data limitations in the biotech sector, the political uncertainty in the energy sector, and the sprawling quantum domain (where different companies, departments, and agencies are struggling to align, even on vocabulary). If the U.S. government could take these steps, the companies developing innovative technologies would be able to make significant progress in the next several years—helping the United States and its like minded economic partners win the technology competition with China.