A separate article in the current issue of this newsletter discusses how the health care sphere in the U.S. can be characterized as consisting of dynamic multiscale systems. Tackling problems effectively in diverse areas will require not only linking vast datasets that encompass numerous components and spatio-temporal scales, but also bringing together multiple disciplines, institutions, departments, and programs. A related way of viewing how to move forward is described in a paper appearing in the March/April 2022 issue of the MIT Technology Review. A case is made for meeting the biggest challenges of today and the future by mobilizing leadership roles across the technology industry, academia, and government so that they act in concert in an innovation ecosystem. A good example demonstrating the power of such a system when mobilized in a crisis is the speed with which vaccines against COVID-19 were developed and deployed.
Vaccines alone have not overcome this pandemic because this disease has revealed weaknesses in the health care system, supply chains, labor markets, social safety net, and even the political system as a way to mount coherent responses to a complex problem. The pandemic also exposed a deeper truth, i.e., that certain triggering events leave the U.S. population subject to intersecting vulnerabilities, with cascading consequences. The appearance and spread of COVID is such a triggering event. In a deeply interconnected world with inherent instabilities that include climate change, inadequate cybersecurity, non-state bad actors, and geopolitical tensions of all kinds, such triggering events are likely to become more frequent if work is not undertaken to forestall them. The risks are not merely economic that hurt both knowledge and a technology-intensive economy, they also are strategic that threaten national and global security. A powerful innovation ecosystem needs to become both more agile and more robust in the face of these risks. Moreover, risk assessments at the federal level must become more holistic and integrated, examining the effect of one danger on another. In conjunction with universities and industry, a government coordinating body should be planning for hazards that could compound other hazards, and offering strategic focus and funding for discoveries and innovations designed to respond to and mitigate them as part of an overall innovation policy.