A Leadership Role for the Department of Commerce
Robert White
Robert M. White was nominated by President Bush to serve as the first Department of Commerce Undersecretary for Technology. His nomination was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on April 5, 1990.
Dr. White directs the Department of Commerce Technology Administration, which is the focal point in the federal government for assisting U.S. industry in improving its productivity, technology, and innovation to compete more effectively in global markets. In particular, the Administration works with industry to eliminate legislative and regulatory barriers to technology commercialization and to encourage adoption of modern technology management practices in technology-based businesses.
In addition to his role as Under Secretary for Technology, Dr. White serves on the President's National Critical Technologies Panel and the National Academy of Science's Roundtable on Government/University/Industry Research. Before joining the Administration, Dr. White was Vice President of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC), the computer industry consortium, where he directed the Advanced Computing Technology program. Dr. White served as Control Data Corporation's Chief Technical Officer and Vice President for Research and Engineering before he joined MCC.
In 1989, Dr. White was named a member of the National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to the field of magnetic engineering. He is also a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In 1980 he received the Alexander von Humboldt Prize from the Federal Republic of Germany. Dr. White holds a B.S. in physics from MIT and a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University.
During Eugene Wong's presentation in this session, he named the eight major players in the High Performance Computing Initiative. You may recall that the Department of Commerce is not among them. Of course, we do have activities at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) that will relate to some of the standardization efforts. And certainly the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, within the Department of Commerce, is going to be a user of high-performance equipment. But more generally, Commerce has an important role to play, and that is what I'd like to discuss.
Near the close of his remarks, Gene listed the ways in which the federal government might help, and I was intrigued by the one that was at the very bottom. You all probably don't remember, but it was leadership. And so I want to talk a little bit about the role that the government can play in leadership. And to do that, I sort of thought of some of the attributes of leadership that we often think about with regard to actual leaders. I want to try to apply them, if you like, to an organization, particularly the Department of Commerce.
One of the first things I think that leadership involves is vision, the conveying of a vision. I think in the past—in the past few years and even in this past week—we've heard a lot of discouraging information, a lot of discouraging data, a lot of discouraging comparisons to competitors. I think Commerce certainly is guilty of pessimism when they publish a lot of their data. We're all guilty of focusing too readily on the gains of our competitors.
I think our vision—the vision I want to see Commerce adopt—is one of a resilient, innovative and competitive nation, a positive vision, one that can look to the future.
One of the elements of competitiveness has to do with manufacturing, particularly manufacturing quality products. And one of the ways in which Commerce plays a leadership role in manufacturing is that we manage the Malcolm Baldrige Award, which basically promotes quality improvement. This program is only a few years old. During the first half
of 1990, we had requests for over 100,000 guideline booklets. I don't know who's going to handle all those applications when they come in.
I think the exciting thing about those guidelines is that they double as a handbook for total quality management. So whether or not you apply for the Baldrige Award or just read the book, you're bound to benefit in terms of quality.
With regard to manufacturing itself, Paul Huray in this session has already mentioned the regional manufacturing centers. Paul emphasized the important fact that this is really the beginning of a very important network. Within Commerce we are also promoting another manufacturing effort, which is the shared manufacturing centers. These are manufacturing centers that are by and large funded by state and local governments, but they are available for small companies to utilize and try new equipment, try new approaches, and perhaps even do prototype runs on things.
And finally NIST, as many of you know, has actually a major automation effort under way that involves many collaborations with industry and federal agencies.
One of the other attributes of leadership is the role of catalyzing, coordinating, and generally focusing. One of the most important assets of the role that Commerce plays is that of convening, the power of convening, and in this way we have access to a lot of data that we can make available to you, hopefully in a useful way. We do maintain clearing-house efforts. We have a database now that has all the state and local technology efforts catalogued for easy accessibility.
Another attribute of a leader, or leadership, is that of empowering those who are part of the organization. In the Department of Commerce, the way that we empower industry, hopefully, is by removing barriers. When it became clear a few years ago that antitrust laws were inhibiting our ability to compete on a global scale, we worked with others to pass the Cooperative Research Act, which has so far made possible several hundred consortia throughout the country. And there is now in Congress a bill to allow cooperative production. I often think that if this bill existed a few years ago, the manufacturing line of the Engineering Technology Associates System could have been formulated as a cooperative effort to share the cost in that very far-thinking effort. And so, if this act passes, companies will certainly be able to work together to benefit from economies of scale.
The federal government also now offers exclusive licenses to technology, particularly that developed within the government laboratories.
And in fact, we have within Commerce a large policy organization that welcomes suggestions from you on removing barriers. In some of our discussions, we heard of some things we do that sound dumb. We'd like to identify those things. We'd like you to come and tell us when you think the federal government is doing something foolish. We can try to change that—change the policy, change the laws. That's one of our functions.
And finally, that brings me to technology policy. Many agencies, as you know, have identified their "critical technologies." The Department of Defense has done so. The Department of Commerce published something that they called "Emerging Technologies."
And as a result of legislation initiated by Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico (a Session 1 presenter), we are now assembling a list of national critical technologies. The thought now is that there will be maybe 30 technologies listed and that the top 10 will be identified.
We also have under way through the Federal Coordinating Committee on Science, Engineering, and Technology an across-the-board exercise to actually inventory all the federal laboratories with regard to those national critical technologies.
And what we hope to do as a result of all of that is to bring together the relevant industrial and federal lab players in these critical technologies—much in the way in which you're brought together here to consider high-performance computing—to talk about priorities and establish a strategic plan—a five-year plan or longer.
The Technology Administration that we have in Congress has been given the power to award grants to industry for technology commercialization. I'm talking about the new Advanced Technology Program. Currently it's very small and very controversial, but it has the potential to become very large.
One of the important elements of this program is that it does require matching funds, and so active involvement by industry is certain. You often hear that this program will support precompetitive and generic technologies, which are acceptable words in Washington now. Precompetitive, to me, means something that several companies are willing to work together on. Anytime you have a consortium effort, almost by definition what they're working on is precompetitive.
All of these programs within the Technology Administration, and the Technology Administration, itself, may be new, but I'm highly optimistic that they will have a major impact.