• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, April 29, 2025

If there’s one thing that has sparked America’s success, it’s innovation, the engine that’s driven the U.S. forward for at least the last several decades.

Yes, the U.S. has natural resources. Yes, at one time the U.S. led the world in manufacturing output. But in its pursuit of adding value to economic output to maximize profit, the U.S. has moved beyond resource extraction and manufacturing to the far-right end of the value chain, where the American economic engine relies heavily on innovation.

Donald Trump can talk all he wants about making America great again by bringing back manufacturing jobs that have migrated elsewhere in the world (a goal that many, including the Economic Policy Institute, feel is a delusion, at least using Trump’s approach), but if innovation dies in the process, the U.S. loses. Game over

Given that, MAGA adherents should be careful what they wish for. The Great America they envision is a place where it may be impossible for that kind of innovation to survive.

World-class innovation needs an ecosystem with adequate funding for start-ups, a friendly regulatory framework, a robust research environment, and an open-door policy for innovative immigrants from other countries -- all of which the U.S. has historically had in spades. And -- theoretically at least -- it’s an ecosystem that Trump is promising high tech, and why the tech broligarchy has been quick to court him. But, as with so many things Trump promises, the reality will fall far short.

Next to the regulatory and economic inputs required for innovation -- and perhaps more important than both -- the biggest requirement is an environment that fosters divergent thinking. collaboration, inviting different perspectives and providing a safe space for experimentation. All these factors are lacking in the environment the U.S. now fosters.

Each year, the World Intellectual Property Organization publishes its  Global Innovation Index. In 2024, the U.S. was in the third spot, behind Switzerland and Sweden.

Of the top 10 (the others are Singapore, the U.K., South Korea, Finland, Netherlands, Germany and Denmark), almost all score the highest marks for the strength of their democracy. Singapore is still struggling towards full democracy, and the U.S. is now considered to be a “flawed democracy,” in real danger of becoming an authoritarian regime.

The European contenders also receive very high marks for their social values and enshrined personal rights and freedoms. Those are exactly the things currently being dismantled in America.

There's only one country defined as an authoritarian regime that made the top 25 of the Global Innovation Index. China sits in the 11^th spot. This brings us to a good question: Can innovation happen in an authoritarian regime? The answer, I believe, is a qualified yes.

I happened to visit China right around the time Google was trying to move into the huge Chinese market. Its main competition was Baidu, the homegrown search engine. I was talking to a Google engineer about how the company was competing with Baidu. He said it was almost impossible to match the speed at which the Chinese company could roll out new features. Because it innovated through brute force, the Chinese could afford to endlessly code and recode.

It's brute-force innovation that you’ll find in authoritarian regimes and dictatorships. It’s what the Soviets used to compete in the space race. It’s what Nazi Germany used when it developed rocket science in a desperate bid to survive World War II. It is innovation dictated by the regime,  despite the fact that the typical underpinnings of innovation -- creative freedom, divergent thinking, the security needed to experiment and fail --have been eliminated.

If you look at the playbook Trump seems to be following -- akin to the one Victor Orbán used in Hungary (ranked 36^th on the Global Innovation Index) or Putin’s Russia (ranked 59^th) --  there seems little hope for the U.S. to retain its world dominance in innovation.