Maas summarizes the authors’ concerns with growth projections: “Declining research production may in part be explained by firms shifting to ‘defensive' R&D to protect their market positions.” Further, they say that overall research productivity may have suffered because of a decline in basic research spending stemming from reductions in publicly funded research as a share of GDP.
State and university programs to support R&D and university-industry collaboration may wish to explore mechanisms to increase research productivity and lower costs. Federal R&D investments may need to support higher risk, breakthrough research areas such as artificial photosynthesis or leap frog technologies to begin to shift the trend.
Otherwise, as Maas quotes the authors’ conclusion: “[J]ust to sustain constant growth in GDP per person, the U.S. must double the amount of research effort searching for new ideas every 13 years to offset the increased difficulty of finding new ideas."