Innovation Nation and NASA

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the KM World conference http://www.kmworld.com/kmw08/ in San Jose, California.  KM stands for knowledge management.  I also presented “Piloting Social Networking Inside NASA” about the NASAsphere pilot. You can find the JPL document reviewed copy of my presentation slideshare Piloting Social Networking Inside NASA

During the conference, I attended this really great keynote talk by John Kao.  He is the author of Innovation Nation .  He taught a popular course on the subject at the Harvard Business School for 14 years, and he has also served as a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab and the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.  He is a world recognized leading expert on the topic of innovation and in fact other countries are hiring him to help them create an innovation strategy for their respective countries.  He is currently working with Finland and has worked with leaders in Shanghi.  This is exactly one of his points everyone else is creating an innovation strategy except the US.

One of the points Kao made in his keynote was his opinion that the first and last US national innovation strategy came when Dwight Eisenhower created NASA in 1958. The launch of Sputnik in 1957, spurred the US to create an innovation strategy.  According to Kao, the creation of NASA drove US to change the way it approached and focused on education–specifically on science, engineering, and math–thus creating the US as an innovation nation.  However, that was the last time.  Currently, no one from the US is knocking on his door for ideas on how to create a US innovation strategy.

John Kao also shared his Cobert Nation interview from October 4th, 2007 which gives you some sense of his ideas www.colbertnation.com

What do you think?  Has the US lost the “innovation nation” label?  What is NASA’s current role in creating a new innovation strategy or innovation nation?