David Rothkopf: The Myth of the Innovation Nation

[David Rothkopf is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and President and CEO of Garten Rothkopf.]

President Obama is absolutely right to focus on innovation and competitiveness in his State of the Union. The United States' strength and stability depend on it, and they are both areas in which the government has a vital role to play -- as history has shown with every expansionary leap in U.S. history from the railroads to the Internet.

But there is one trap associated with this approach that the president and the country need to beware. It is the widely subscribed to notion ... often cited by politicians and op-ed writers ... that somehow there is something special, some gene in American DNA, that makes us uniquely capable when it comes to innovation....

For example, go to About.com and look up the top inventions researched by their readers. While it's as arbitrary as any other such list the top ten are: the telephone, the computer, television, the automobile, the cotton gin, the camera, the steam engine, the sewing machine, the light bulb, and penicillin. Of these, the phone was"invented" by Alexander Graham Bell in the United States, he was born and raised in Scotland, moved to the United States as an adult and died in Canada. And, of course, prior to his patenting of the phone, original work was done on its invention by a range of others including Innocenzo Manzetti in Italy, Charles Bourseul in France, and Johann Philipp Reis in Germany. The fathers of computing from Babbage to Turing lived in Britain. The first television was invented by a German, Paul Nipkow, and the term was coined by a Russian, Constantin Perskyi. The first self-propelled vehicle was invented by a Frenchman, Joseph Cugnot, and the first practical car by Karl Benz. The camera's origins were in France with Niepce and Daguerre. The first steam engine was developed by Thomas Savery in England and improved upon by Scotland's better-known James Watt. Sewing machine? Invented by French tailor Barthelemy Thimonnier. The light bulb? No, not Edison. Probably the first credit should go to Humphry Davy of England or Sir Joseph Wilson Swan, also of England. Penicillin? A Scots-born Englishman, Alexander Fleming....