Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, today I am introducing the Consortia-Led Energy and Advanced Manufacturing Networks Act.

For more than a century, America's innovation community has been the foundation of our high-tech economy and generated broad-based growth to support a strong middle class. While our innovators remain the best in the world, we have seen a disturbing trend in recent years. When it comes to moving innovations out of the lab and into the factory, we are getting beat. Breakthroughs achieved in U.S. research universities and laboratories are all too often being commercialized and manufactured overseas. As recent research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others has demonstrated, innovation and production are closely related. When manufacturing facilities move overseas, we lose more than just those manufacturing jobs. We can lose our ability to continue to innovate in that industry and lose our hold on those jobs forever.

At the same time, we have some industries in the United States dominated by deeply entrenched companies that are resistant to innovation or adaptation of century-old business models. In those sectors, we need to look at ways of partnering with our innovators on proof-of-concept and demonstration projects so that more breakthroughs can bridge the so-called ``Valley of Death'' between the lab bench and commercialization of a new technology. That will ensure that innovative and potentially disruptive technologies can actually reach the market, and provide badly needed competition in industries where incumbents may be failing to innovate. This is what my legislation is intended to address.

In order to reach their full market potential, scientific breakthroughs must be translated into commercial applications, demonstrated, connected to appropriate markets, and scaled up. The bill I am introducing today would fertilize America's innovation ecosystems by making available $100 million to 6 or more consortia to support these types of activities and help shepherd innovations through the commercialization process. Consortia could include a mix of research universities, large and small companies, national laboratories, venture capital, and state and nonprofit entities with expertise in technology commercialization. The bill includes rigorous cost-share requirements to ensure that taxpayers are only partnering on the best ideas in which the private sector also has significant capital committed.

We have seen the benefits of regional innovation ecosystems in places like Silicon Valley; Boston, Cambridge and the Route 128 Corridor; the Research Triangle in North Carolina; Austin, TX; and elsewhere. The geographic proximity of institutions in these areas improves the flow of information between scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs, and it facilitates the sharing of skilled human resources and facilities. Most critically when it comes to commercializing innovations, these regions have demonstrated a unique ability to pull investor capital off the sidelines and channel it into new production. We need to bolster these existing ecosystems and help nurture new ones.

America's universities and research institutions are truly national treasures. Our venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are the sharpest in the world. When we sprinkle the right mix of scientific brain power and capitalist drive, we get something uniquely American and extremely potent.

This legislation will help link inventors with investors, professors with producers, and get technologies out of laboratories and into factories. It provides the type of responsible and forward-looking partnership that we need with the private sector right now. This legislation builds on provisions I included in both the Waxman-Markey bill and the America COMPETES reauthorization, bills that passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

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