A Networked Leapfrog Strategy to Recapture Technology Leadership

It is now widely agreed that the contest for leadership in frontier scientific and technological progress is one of the foremost elements—if not the centerpiece—of the U.S.-China rivalry. The Chinese Communist Party leadership appears to believe that science and technology offer the primary engines of development and innovation that will realize its goals of national rejuvenation; thus, the party is investing massively across many areas of this domain.^[1] After years of taking a largely hands-off approach to this contest, at least from a government standpoint, the United States now appreciates the significance of the contest for leadership in science and technology as foundational to the economic and national security aspects of the rivalry and has begun responding to the Chinese effort with investments, policies, and export controls of its own.^[2]

This competition is vital not only in terms of relative bilateral power between the United States and China but also in terms of the echo effects on global technology networks. As in the telecommunications, computer, and software age, the nation whose innovations become the default global standard is set to acquire immense potential influence in the next frontiers of technological innovation, application, and use. In areas from biomedical advances to artificial intelligence (AI) to renewable energy and to fifth-generation (5G) communications, the world will increasingly confront choices between U.S. (or other democratic nation) options and Chinese ones. Achieving decisive leadership in science and technology would provide profound network advantages in what is ultimately a contest for systemic global influence.

The U.S. public and private sectors have undertaken dozens of initiatives to improve U.S. standing, ranging from federal sponsorship of semiconductor production to investments and tax credits for renewable energy to private-sector research and development (R&D) and innovation. Leadership in science and technology is ultimately fueled by a tremendously wide array of national characteristics, policies, and investments.^[3] The best recent evidence suggests that China has made tremendous progress in catching up to the United States in many technology areas, has taken the global lead in several dozen of these areas, and could steadily overtake the United States in several others over the next five to ten years.^[4]

The purpose of this paper is to identify a specific opportunity to use large-scale, high-risk experiments with capital and R&D to offer disproportionate benefits in the science and technology competition. The paper represents an answer to a provocative question: If the United States were to consider eight- or nine-figure investments in one or a small number of transformative areas, what should they be? The argument is for a series of technology-specific experiments in service of a multilateral leapfrog strategy. This strategy—based on major multinational investments to create or perfect new generations of technologies in critical areas that leap over current approaches—would be designed to accelerate toward the development of the next generation of technologies in several key areas. Doing so in cooperation with most other leading industrial economies would serve to lock in important network effects around the new innovations. I endorse a specific version of a leapfrog strategy aimed at creating new breakthroughs rather than leapfrogging in current technologies with better manufacturing or forms of government support. Such a strategy offers a far better chance of avoiding Chinese superiority in science and technology a decade from now than chasing after current-generation technologies in which China has already built powerful systemic advantages.

I first suggest objectives the United States should be pursuing in the technology competition, then suggest several criteria that can help identify promising experiments to shape the trajectory of that competition, describe how the idea proposed here meets these criteria, and offer some detail about what the experiments might be. This paper is itself something of an analytical experiment, offering a bold direction for policy and strategy that is grounded in research. As such a provocation, the concept proposed here will need further analysis, testing, and experimentation for full validation. But I will suggest reasons that this strategy may be the best strategy for continual technology leadership.

Clarifying Objectives

Before developing a strategy for selecting experiments to improve the U.S. position in the science and technology competition, we need a sense of goals and objectives. What are the goals of U.S. competitive strategy for these domains? What are we trying to achieve and over what period?

This is a complex question for a contest in such a sprawling area of national power. In an earlier assessment of possible end states in this competition, I argued that

[c]onceptualizing an endgame or vision of enduring success for a broad-based scientific and technological competition is extremely challenging, for several reasons. Treatments of the issue often use buzzwords like "control," "hegemony," or "domination" to describe potential great power influence over technology domains, but no such clean outcomes are likely. Competition encompasses myriad frontier technologies and dozens of subcomponents within each domain. Perhaps most of all, because science and technology advance without end, establishing a clear threshold for success or anything like a singular endgame remains elusive.^[5]

In an effort to reflect the scope and complexity of this competition, I would propose the following objectives for U.S. policy:^[6]

1. The domestic U.S. foundations of scientific and technological innovation, including the supporting science and technology ecosystem, must remain at a world-class level—specifically, the technological and intellectual ecosystem (ranging from power grids, data centers, and research centers to the quality of university science and technology programs) must remain equivalent or superior to those of any other country by accepted metrics of quality.
2. The domestic capability for the diffusion and application of the technologies—the financial and infrastructural foundations of the technology ecosystem, the domestic standard-setting processes, the supply of educated specialists to develop new breakthroughs, and much more—must be vibrant and effective at enabling the practical employment of advances.
3. No major rival should obtain a monopoly position or a lasting, dominant advantage in any critical field of science and technology.
4. U.S. and allied partner technologies and standards should continue to exercise leading influence in global networks.
5. The United States should remain free from catastrophic risk to its science and technology sector, military capabilities, or broader society because of dependencies on foreign supplies of the most-essential components or materials or of vulnerability to active disruption—a situation in which denial of one or more minerals, materials, or subcomponents could threaten economic and military power to a degree that would provide an outside actor with the ability to dictate terms on major disputes.

Such an agenda does not demand that the United States achieve dominance in any area of science and technology (or even in global network influence). History suggests that such dominance is not sustainable in specific areas indefinitely in any case. The key is to create a dynamic ecosystem for basic and applied science and technological development and diffusion, something that will produce lasting competitiveness across various domains. That should be the goal of any large-scale investment in experimentation to supercharge technology competitiveness.

A multilateral leapfrog strategy, with many experiments targeted at several especially vital technologies, would serve all these objectives.

Criteria for Identifying High-Risk Experiments

The aim of this assessment is to identify promising, high-risk experiments for U.S. government funding to shift the trajectory of the science and technology competition that serve that very broad goal. Given recent RAND work on that competition and major studies from other institutions, I would propose the following criteria for selection of such high-risk experimental investments:

• In general terms, public-sector investments are most appropriate when they meet criteria that highlight times when public-sector intervention is valuable or needed.^[7] These criteria include the following:
  • efforts that can be expected to create public goods, such as generally sharable knowledge, and that provide positive spillovers through knowledge-sharing by, for example, creating new knowledge in a field of science on which researchers can then rely
  • projects with long time horizons generally beyond those that private-sector firms would be able to justify for large investments
  • efforts in the area of basic research or, in the case of public-private partnerships, applied research and prototypes
  • higher-risk bets that private-sector capital may shy away from
  • efforts that have the potential to catalyze large-scale private-sector investments to move technology progress forward
  • efforts focused on issues with strong national strategic importance.

  Classic examples of projects that met some or all of these criteria in the past include the famous Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) research in such areas as semiconductors and networked communications (which laid the groundwork for the internet) and the broad-based suite of science and technology investments in the Apollo program.

• In investment strategy and portfolio focused on the current U.S.-China technology balance should have the potential to affect the overall scientific and technological balance rather than merely affecting one area. History suggests that techno-industrial revolutions and technology competitions are won or lost through the interaction of many variables: private-sector investments, workforce quality, public-private and industry-academic collaborations, and much more. An experiment that boosted one area might have little measurable effect on this larger array of factors.

  Historical examples that illustrate this principle again include federal R&D projects that helped lay the groundwork for the internet, which had perhaps the most generalized wider impact of any technology in history, and R&D spending on a variety of interconnected biotechnology experiments, which have generated new knowledge and applications in synergistic ways. Some narrower efforts could potentially have wide application, such as a specific additive manufacturing capability, which would then create new possibilities for manufacturing many products.

• Federal government experimentation in science and technology today should focus on areas in which the private sector is less likely to invest. In a market economy, the largest proportion of R&D and capital will be deployed by private actors. This has become increasingly true over time: As late as the 1960s, the government was responsible for well over half of domestic R&D funding; today, the private-sector accounts for the majority.^[8] The field of AI is a leading example today, with firms and investors plowing hundreds of billions of dollars into AI development.

  Examples of this principle have changed over time because federal R&D spending was once a much higher proportion of the national total, and private-sector capital is now responsible for a greater proportion of technological advances. Leading historical examples of this have targeted areas deemed too risky or long term by private capital—such as DARPA's Strategic Computing Initiative, the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Advanced Technology Program, and the National Nanotechnology Initiative.

• Any experimentation portfolio should have a theory of success that does not require magical thinking about changes in the structural realities of the U.S.-China technology balance. As I will argue, some elements of Chinese advantages cannot be directly matched, such as the scale of Chinese manufacturing. Experiments should focus on indirect approaches to work around these structural advantages rather than going head-on against leading Chinese strengths.

  Examples of magical thinking in the current context might include experiments to recapture the global lead in shipbuilding.

With these criteria as a guide, I reviewed factors underpinning China's remarkable advances in these domains to help set the context for selecting high-potential experiments, including through the application of the criteria.

The Foundations of China’s Scientific and Technological Strengths

As it attempts to identify effective strategies to compete with China in science and technology, the United States needs to appreciate the character of China's challenge in this domain. China has made tremendous progress in catching up with—and, in a growing number of areas, surpassing—the United States. It has done so thanks to an interlocking set of advantages in its science and technology development model:^[9]

• Large-scale, direct government funding and subsidies. Under such programs as Made in China 2025, promotion of national champions in specific sectors, support for strategic emerging industries and state-owned enterprises in high-tech fields,^[10] and dozens of technology-specific initiatives, the Chinese government has, at multiple levels, directed hundreds of billions of dollars to basic science, R&D, and the creation of specific technologies.^[11] China's national R&D budget for 2024 alone has been estimated at $52 billion, and its larger science and technology program has many components beyond that. At the same time, China directs immense state subsidies to firms in key technology sectors. In just one example, one study estimates that China's subsidies for green technology industries are up to nine times as large as those in the European Union.^[12]
• Broad-based, strategically targeted international collaborations. Through private-sector joint ventures and collaborations; cooperation between universities and research organizations; fellowships for individual scholars; hundreds of thousands of students studying abroad to gain world-class educations in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields; and in other ways, China has engaged deeply with global leaders in various scientific and technological fields and brought back tremendous basic knowledge and application and manufacturing expertise that helped fuel China's rise.
• Regime support through other means. China also gains competitive advantage through state efforts across a variety of licit and illicit means. It undertakes state-led competitive strategies, such as making technology transfer requirements of foreign technology firms investing in China and investing in international network power in various ways. It has developed a growing suite of laws and sanctions as tools to be used in economic competition.^[13] It also employs various intelligence means to steal intellectual property, from basic research labs to deployed technologies, across the whole range of science and technology frontiers.^[14] These efforts are guided by centralized strategic planning and goal-setting, which can generate broad-based edicts that produce significant inefficiencies but also unquestionably create clear directions for policy and progress.
• Strong ecosystem of university and government-run research labs. China has developed an impressive array of state-run laboratories. This network fuels scientific and technological progress, develops talent, and engages in international cooperative activities to bring expertise into China. The network is a critical support structure for China's overall strategy.^[15]
• Massive industrial capacity. China has become the world's leading manufacturing power, accounting for almost one-third of total global manufacturing output,^[16] a total greater than the next nine manufacturing powers combined.^[17] China has put its tremendous scale and massive market to work creating the industrial sandbox for firms that then go abroad and conquer key industries. In certain specific areas, such as solar cells and batteries, China has become the absolutely dominant manufacturing power. This directly supports its science and technology agenda by providing a ready outlet for products generated from that pipeline. This success in prompting industrial power also has indirect effects on China's innovation capacity.^[18] Moreover, industrial capacity translates into other forms of scientific and technological advantages. As one author has noted, China has bolstered its manufacturing prowess in part "because they [the capabilities] bring many valuable intangibles and synergies with them: a highly skilled industrial workforce, faster prototyping schedules, and mastery of supply chains."^[19] Manufacturing power also tends to enhance innovation because much of that occurs in response to needs across the manufacturing pipeline.
• Thoroughly integrated domestic supply chains in key technology areas. China also benefits from highly integrated supply chains in technology areas; these supply chains provide the world's most advanced capacity for taking the fruits of R&D and bringing them to market.^[20] These supply chains create moats around Chinese technology deployment capabilities because they can be effectively impossible to replicate. This is true in such areas as cellphones, for example, in which China has a domestic supply chain ecosystem that cannot be fully matched.^[21] Along with its industrial capacity, these domestic supply chains empower R&D and technology development by linking together private-sector research, development, and manufacturing activities across firms and sectors and connecting them to universities and research laboratories.^[22]
• Huge and increasingly skilled workforce. Finally, China has the largest science and technology workforce in the world, one that continues to grow and is grounded in domestic educational institutions that are increasingly competitive. Through the Thousand Talents Program, China has sought to attract home highly skilled workers and researchers and create a powerful reward system incentivizing high-tech related expertise. Even when such programs generate significant inefficiencies, they redouble China's workforce advantages.

Taken together, these advantages provide tremendous structural power in the science and technology arena that is exceptionally difficult to match head-to-head. China has significant challenges and barriers as well—the argument here is merely that the scale, degree of government support, and manufacturing muscle and integration behind China's science and technology drive together offer powerful competitive advantages. These elements call into question a commonly proposed strategy for dealing with China's advances—to attempt to muscle back into the lead in specific technologies or across the board with new U.S. investments. The comprehensive nature of China's techno-industrial power, as well as its scale and availability of state-directed resources, make such an approach infeasible. In shipbuilding, for example, China now has about 2,000 times the U.S. capacity; in 2024 alone, its largest commercial shipbuilder produced more new tonnage than the entire U.S. maritime industry has built since World War II.^[23] There is no conceivable future in which the United States fundamentally reverses that situation or even becomes a serious competitor to Japan or South Korea, the world's other two leading shipbuilders.

China has benefited in its catch-up strategy from the fact that much technology competition is now in relatively commoditized products, ranging from software to solar cells to batteries for electric vehicles. These decades-old technologies are being perfected to high levels of quality and capability but are broadly available. A skilled second mover can, therefore, accelerate into market leadership with a combination of R&D, strong innovation ecosystems, and efficient and state-subsidized manufacturing to crowd out other players.

A related trend is the slowing momentum of scientific and technological progress. Many observers have commented on the ebbing of new scientific ideas.^[24] If true, this creates a situation beneficial to models based on incremental innovation, often copying or stealing ideas from others, backed by world-class industrial capacity and integrated supply chains. China is well positioned to succeed in such a world.

The upshot of these trends is that China—a state-directed economy with immense size, scale, manufacturing prowess, and fast-follower incremental innovation capacity—has been well positioned to seize market share from the United States and other leading technology powers and to innovate incrementally in key areas. The current technology landscape is in some ways tailor-made for a large, savvy, technically competent second mover, such as China. As noted earlier, China benefits from some characteristics—scale, central guidance, and massive state subsidies—that the United States is simply not equipped to match.

To shift the trajectory of the competition, the United States must change this dynamic. It must return sources of advantage to breakthrough technologies and radical innovation and do so in a way that sidesteps the need to confront China's brute force approach head on.

The Proposal: Experiments to Empower a Multilateral Leapfrog Strategy

Given these background conditions and trends, using powerfully funded experiments to claw back advantage from China in selected technology areas through accelerated incremental advances is not likely to be possible in most domains. China's systemic, workforce, scale, and government involvement advantages are simply too great. But there is an alternative: selecting several areas of Chinese advantage and leapfrogging the current generation of technology to create a new playing field. Rather than trying to re-create a solar or battery industry in the United States along current lines, the strategy would seem to develop next-generation energy technologies that supersede those—from small modular nuclear reactors to fusion energy to other forms of energy generation that have not yet been invented or perfected. Rather than trying to compete head-to-head with Huawei in global cellular networks, this strategy would generate post-5G technologies that offer vastly better alternatives. A large series of experiments funded in the tens to hundreds of billions of dollars over several years could supercharge such a process.

Plenty of leapfrog bets go on in the United States already—funded by DARPA or some especially risk-tolerant venture capital firms (such as Y Combinator). But the vast majority of private-sector R&D is in developmental work, which is designed to perfect or develop products to bring them to market rather than generate leapfrog advances.^[25] Federal funding has higher proportions devoted to basic research, but the majority is still in the categories of applied and developmental R&D.^[26] One obvious explanation for these patterns is that private-sector capital is seeking near-term profits and, therefore, will be naturally biased in favor of incremental rather than breakthrough investments. Another reason for downplaying leapfrog strategies may be mindset: The United States has viewed itself as the global leader in science and technology. It does not need to formally cultivate leapfrog strategies—and to the extent it does do so, radical new inventions might put at risk some existing U.S. technological advantages. The character of scientific research may also play a role: New experiments are generally designed to push the boundaries of knowledge forward from existing facts, not, generally, to generate transformative new understandings.

Yet the context for U.S. science and technology leadership—both the current moment in scientific and technological progress and the U.S. standing relative to China—demand a new approach. It is time to overcome these barriers and pursue a more intentional national strategy of leapfrogging to new advantages.

The Character of Leapfrog Strategies

Leapfrog strategies in business or national competition, as the name implies, seek to strike past a current techno-industrial context or technology context in a specific industry to discover and apply capabilities and approaches that define a new frontier.^[27] These strategies reflect the idea that business models and technologies can reach a plateau of development in which major competitors are struggling for modest incremental gains. At such times, jumping ahead to fundamentally new sources of advantage can be a viable strategy.

In part, leapfrog strategies take advantage of a path-dependent effect of current-generation technology: For highly successful market leaders, revolutionary new approaches will seem like threats rather than opportunities.^[28] Scholars have identified leapfrogging strategies (some highly intentional, some emergent) as patterns of national development in broader terms, approaches that build on Gerschenkron's classic ideas of second-mover advantages.^[29] China itself has employed the approach in several industries as part of a wider catch-up process, although often in a form that could be described as radical incrementalism—imitating and building on while jumping past the current industrial and technological condition of some domains (such as solar cells and electric vehicles) while remaining within the general framework of current products.^[30]

Such strategies have been particularly relevant in technology competitions, both in specific domains and more generally.^[31] These strategies can come in various flavors, for example, more-incremental innovation, radical innovation, and intrasector and intersector leapfrogging.^[32]

These distinctions get to the critical questions of what a leapfrog strategy is trying to jump past and what sort of advantage it is trying to create in the process. China has already employed leapfrog strategies using incremental rather than transformative technology advances within specific industries—leaping ahead of the industrial and manufacturing standing of competitors and then using subsidies to gain position in ways that emphasize market share over profits, without necessarily innovating dramatically in the capacity of the technology itself. This amounts to more of an industrial catch-up and overtaking approach than an innovation advance, although incremental tweaks to existing technologies can definitely be part of this process.

What I have in mind here is something different: a leapfrog strategy based on bypassing current generations of technology to create new technologies that replace current ones, reflecting new ways to solve existing problems. This approach would not involve creating efficient new manufacturing techniques to leapfrog Chinese industrial dominance in photovoltaics; it would mean finding the successor to solar cells—or a radically new approach to them—which would become the new standard. My concept here is, therefore, a specific form of innovation-based leapfrogging whose goal is to nullify key Chinese advantages by rendering existing technologies obsolete. China's industrial advantages in solar would not go away—but the market would turn away from their products.

An obvious question for any such strategy is whether the new technologies and their production and use involve high barriers to entry. If not—if the successor renewal energy product can be fairly simply mass-produced by any nation willing to make significant investments in the manufacturing base—the advantages technology leapfrogging conveys would be relatively brief and unsustainable.^[33] This is especially true because of China's demonstrated practice of stealing intellectual property, subsidizing domestic catch-up players, and making large investments in the necessary R&D. One criterion for identifying such opportunities, then, is whether they involve some combination of defensible intellectual property, complex manufacturing processes with large elements of intrinsic knowledge, complex supply chains, or other characteristics that make them hard to copy at speed.

Yet we should not overemphasize the requirement for stiff barriers to entry in breakthrough areas. An advance that quickly invalidated years of Chinese catch-up efforts and fragmented its control of a given market would be of huge value even if China could match the new technology within a few years. The United States and its partners would then have the opportunity to design strategies for competitive advantage that anticipate Chinese catch-up techniques and mitigate them—such as tariffs on highly subsidized Chinese products and much stricter control of intellectual property—to obstruct the sort of leapfrogging China has accomplished in such areas as solar cells and electric vehicles.

Moreover, this strategy must become an ongoing process or discipline—a concept for a constant process of catalyzing thousands of experiments designed to generate technology advances in many critical domains. The idea is to keep moving forward in ways that can neutralize many current Chinese areas of dominance and prevent such outcomes in the future. The goal is to generate a long series of protected or resilient advances that deny China its most traditional tools of rapid catch-up.

Such an innovation-based leapfrog strategy—particularly one, as I will propose later, with a significant component of multilateral collaboration—would appear to meet the four criteria suggested earlier for the kinds of experimentation that would be appropriate to the current moment. They fulfill key factors justifying public-sector investments, including higher risk, longer time horizons, the involvement of basic or applied research and prototyping, and national strategic importance. Applied to several technology domains, a leapfrog approach is a systemic concept with the potential to shift the technology balance across the board. Private-sector R&D is going into these areas but not at the scale required to push the technology frontier sufficiently to have a high probability of generating usable leapfrog advances.^[34]

Identifying Domains in Which Leapfrog Strategies Have a Greater Chance of Working

The literature on leapfrogging strategies suggests several conditions under which such approaches have a higher chance of providing technological—and associated techno-industrial—advantage. Broadly speaking, there are five primary signals that a domain might be ripe for leapfrog approaches:

1. The potential for a technological discontinuity. Most technological progress is incremental, but at certain times in particular domains, new innovations offer the possibility of a more significant leap ahead. It is when the technological frontier is moving ahead especially dramatically within particular domains—in ways that solve economic or social problems better than existing technologies—that leapfrog strategies become possible.

2. Areas in which existing domains of knowledge intersect to create new opportunities. Howard Yu suggests, as one of his essential principles of leap strategies, that firms should

   [a]cquire and cultivate new knowledge disciplines. What we will learn from the history of modern medicine is that knowledge uncovered in one area often leads to new discoveries elsewhere. And it is this ongoing discovery process that ultimately opens new paths for growth.^[35]

   Leapfrog opportunities will often emerge at junctions between fields of knowledge.

3. A lack of crippling legacy structural or systemic barriers to change. Leapfrog strategies are most effective when a new technology can escape broader systemic or institutional constraints that create immense costs to shift to new approaches and tend to lock in existing ones. Leapfrog strategies must be of a character that does not require massive organizational change or infrastructure redesign to be implemented. More-modular technologies able to be integrated into existing systems meet this criterion. There is a clear tension here: The strategy is seeking dramatic technology advances, which will call for significant institutional change in some cases (for example, in the structure of private-sector firms) to achieve their full advantage. But not all new technologies will require dramatic supporting reforms throughout society. This criterion reflects a balance to be struck, but the funding experiments should at least attempt to identify breakthroughs that do not face a steep uphill climb in institutional, bureaucratic, or organizational opposition.
4. The potential for the new technology to achieve rapid uptake and diffusion. Leaping ahead makes most sense when the emergent capability can be rapidly adopted and has large scaling effects. If its spread will be highly constrained (by cost, critical materials, market loyalty and stickiness of existing technologies, legal or regulatory barriers, or other factors), the leap will be slow, and the competitor will have an opportunity to recognize the shift and catch up.
5. The potential for government-sponsored experiments to create opportunities that attract much higher levels of private-sector investment. The best results from U.S. government R&D programs have come when catalytic government R&D helps initiate new technologies or whole new product areas, which then attract private-sector capital to carry progress forward. One recent example—although it is more incremental than a true leapfrog approach—is the CHIPS Act's $39 billion in investment in semiconductors, which has generated more than $450 billion in private-sector investments.^[36] Managers of a leapfrog strategy should be looking for experiments that, if they are successful, will create a powerful force for crowding in private-sector capital.

These criteria reflect a public-private collaboration in leapfrog strategies that is very common in many technology areas. Whether in the relationship between DARPA and defense contractors in national security or between domestic and international investments in climate technology and the private energy sector, it is very common for the public sector to seek to catalyze a technology area with the expectation that the private sector will then move in and develop these opportunities—a combination that sometimes takes the form of very explicit strategies of coordinated work.

As noted in one of the criteria earlier, a tension therefore exists within the requirements for effective leapfrog applications in technology areas. The technologies must be free enough of institutional, regulatory, and habitual and loyalty constraints to be deployable fairly quickly. Yet the technologies must also rely on other factors to be difficult to replicate—protected intellectual property, unique ecosystems of development and deployment, reliance on scarce materials or talent, or other factors.

An obvious tool in the pursuit of leapfrog strategies will be AI. One possible conception of this whole strategy is as an AI-empowered leapfrog approach—although not all innovations would necessarily rely on AI applications. Still, the effort should incorporate cutting-edge AI tools—as well as the AI-skilled workforce to apply them—to the maximum degree to ensure that the experiments gain every bit of advantage possible from AI.

Five Domains for Experimentation: Leapfrog Strategies in Specific Issue Areas

This analysis suggests that a significant new investment in technological and institutional experimentation could profitably focus on developing leapfrog capabilities and approaches that bypass rather than confront head-on established and emerging Chinese advantages in selected areas. This paper is only a preliminary analysis; significant research and analysis would be required to identify both the best domains for the application of such a strategy and the specific experiments to fund within each.

Simply as an illustration, using the criteria for plausible leapfrogging strategies mentioned earlier, I identified five areas in which such approaches could be employed. In each case, research would be required to identify clear evidence of potential leapfrog capabilities:

1. Semiconductors: toward a post-silicon era. As recent debates over AI capability have indicated, semiconductor chips are increasingly essential to national power and economic survival. This is true of both frontier chips essential for AI and other high-end application and of legacy chips that are the foundation of thousands of products throughout the economy. Researchers are working on several options for dramatically different future designs of computing capacity that heavily modify, or depart entirely from, today's silicon-based computing approach. These include gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) computing systems; two-dimensional materials, such as molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂); carbon nanotubes and graphene approaches; and photonic, neomorphic, or quantum computing. (Some of these, notably GaN and SiC, are reasonably close to exploitation and may no longer count as leapfrog approaches.) An experimentation strategy could seek to bring some of these to deployment capability but also generate radical new ideas for computing. It would also aim to spur concepts and practical designs for the necessary ecosystems—of software, hardware, standards, and other factors—to empower the rapid adoption of successful candidates. If successful, this strategy would create the foundation for a new paradigm of computing, with widespread implications across technologies and economies.
2. Cellular communication: to 6G and beyond. Huawei's role in 5G communications, and the substantial inroads it has made in global cellular networks as a result of its cheap and high-quality offerings, have been a defining case study of the U.S.-China technology competition. There are potential leapfrog opportunities to jump past the infrastructure-intensive 5G approach to new methods of cellular communications. These include low earth orbit–based satellite architectures, terahertz communications, visible light communication, and others. Some of these approaches comprise the elements of what is sometimes termed a future move into 6G communications, and many firms are already far along in research to develop and deploy some versions of these new approaches. As in the other areas, of course, the idea of an experimentation campaign would be to generate novel ideas for post-5G communications even apart from these known alternatives.
3. Renewable and distributed energy. China has taken a dominant position in various techno-industrial domains relevant to renewable energy, including batteries and solar cells. But current approaches come with many drawbacks—high reliance on environmentally challenged rare earth minerals, limits to energy generation periods, limited reserve capacity, and more—that point toward the potential for dramatic new technologies that would leapfrog the solar and wind approaches. These could include both emerging technologies (e.g., fusion energy, radical new forms of energy storage beyond lithium batteries, advanced geothermal energy, artificial photosynthesis, ocean or tidal energy systems, and thermoelectric power) and systemic advances (e.g., microgrid systems managed by AI).
4. Health care diagnostics and telemedicine. Many emerging technologies—a significant number relying on AI—are poised to transform monitoring, diagnosis, and treatment of illness in ways that could have significant effects on national power. Advances include AI-driven diagnostics; point-of-care diagnostics; AI-developed personalized health care plans; biosensors and continuous monitoring, including on smartphones; and the use of AI and biotechnology for disease prevention and cure. Major progress in these areas, apart from improving life conditions across populations, could offer immense fiscal advantages with competitive implications. Nations capable of offering integrated health applications would also gain global influence. Hundreds of research programs and experiments are already underway in this space; a leapfrog strategy component in this area could both identify a few specific areas to turbocharge and catalyze innovations in systems development to integrate the new technologies.
5. Advanced manufacturing. Breakthroughs in this field could significantly shift the global manufacturing and industrial landscape, undercutting some of the advantages China has earned with state investments and scale. Nearer-term possibilities include such technologies as industrial-size three-dimensional manufacturing, advanced bioprinting technologies, AI-driven three-dimensional printing and additive manufacturing, and digital manufacturing networks or additive supply chains. Longer-term and chancier possibilities include atomic and nanoscale additive manufacturing and responsive and adaptive materials. Although constraints will exist on the applications for such advanced manufacturing methods, leapfrog advances in two or more of these areas could have significant implications in many industries.

Again, these are only examples. A comprehensive strategy to achieve leapfrog advances through multilateral experimentation will need, as a first phase, to identify the areas—from this list or others—most suitable for the strategy. It will then need to develop an initial set of experiments in each, although this can and should be a highly decentralized endeavor. The effort could comprise contests, prizes, and open-ended research grants as much as predetermined experimentation directions.

Although no leapfrog advance is likely to reflect barriers to entry that prevent China from catching up even to transformative breakthroughs, the experiments should aim at the development of technologies along with integrated systems—of hardware, software, implementation planning, infrastructure support, and other aspects—that create some barriers to entry and keep China from engaging in rapid second mover strategies. In the case of semiconductors, for example, a radically new design may require new design processes, manufacturing capabilities, specific materials, tacit knowledge among expert technicians, and research ecosystems that, together, form a barrier to easy replication. No U.S. strategy will be able to fulfill that criterion perfectly, of course, but it can be a goal of experimentation approaches.

Indeed, the broader effort would need to look past the creation of new technologies to their diffusion and application. Such second-stage requirements could be built into the effort, both in terms of requirements for the research scopes of experiments and of numerous experiments designed specifically to test diffusion strategies. This is very challenging; the diffusion and application of technologies cannot be predicted at the outset. Placing constraints on experiments based on their capacity for diffusion could stifle innovation. One approach would be to support both sides of this challenge but do so separately: investing in many initial-stage ideas, then for those that show promise, offering a second round of support to catalyze diffusion. Some of these second-phase experiments could examine possible commercialization strategies, including ways of attracting private capital to the development and deployment of the new technology. Separately from the experiments, the larger initiative could include funding for demonstration projects to indicate the potential for new innovations, incentives for private-sector actors to adopt the technologies, and potential subsidies to aid in transitions to using the new innovations.

The goal of the strategy in each case would be to jump past Chinese advantages in key areas, rendering their current market dominance moot. The effort will succeed to the degree that it can catalyze the development of new technologies that will be harder to copy and match and that will generate the new global standard around which networks of application will form.

Challenges and Risks

This approach embodies several challenges and risks that must be taken seriously and, when possible, mitigated. One is the danger of bad bets. If a nation or firm misjudges the potential for such a leap—if the new-generation technology is not yet ready for exploitation (or never will be), or if a specific advance can itself be overtaken by other approaches—it will waste its money and effort. In this sense, some forms of leapfrog strategies carry similar risks to many forms of industrial policy, of trying to outguess the market in terms of picking winners. But the suggestion here is for top-down support for a large number of grassroots experiments from which markets would largely pick winners rather than just a few leading candidates from a centralized process.

A second risk would be opportunity costs, specifically in relation to current technology areas. If the United States had, for example, $100 billion to invest in the science and technology competition, why not pour it into existing U.S. strengths: national R&D, improved STEM education, scholarships for talented international researchers and technology entrepreneurs to come to the United States, or dramatically enhancing one or two especially critical technology areas? I suggested answers earlier: China's structural advantages are too large to persistently defeat with such head-to-head brute force investments. Continued incremental advances simply will not be enough to compete in the long run. Moreover, the value proposition of added investments in education or scholarships might be hard to quantify relative to potential transformative breakthroughs in a leapfrog strategy. Finally, these approaches are not mutually exclusive: The leapfrog experimental support funding could include resources to bring international applicants to the United States.

Another risk of the strategy is that breakthrough innovations may turn out to be very difficult to manufacture on cue. Historically, such advances tend to emerge unpredictably rather than as the focus of planned effort. Again, the bottom-up, experiment-supporting character of the proposal aims to mitigate this risk: It does not count on planners' ability to foresee breakthroughs but only on long-term, continuous experimentation to be able to bump into breakthroughs. DARPA and many venture firms have a reasonably good record of being able to produce a certain proportion of successes. To be sure, in any strategy built around many inherently risky bets, there will be a high proportion of failure. The leapfrog strategy is based on the idea that a relatively small number of transformative successes would achieve the desired competitive advantage.

A fourth and final risk stems from the idea that China would not sit by and watch as the United States set off in a bolder direction—it would take added steps to match any U.S. leapfrog strategy. China's own balance between incremental and bolder R&D expenditures is beyond the scope of this analysis, but several widely reported cases suggest that Beijing is seeking leapfrog advances in such areas as biotechnology and energy. In more-classic business terms, Chinese firms have practiced a form of national catch-up and leapfrog for some time, although predominantly by matching the technologies of advanced countries and then incrementally perfecting the technologies. But if it saw dozens of major investments in transformative bets from the United States, Beijing would likely respond in similar ways. The competitive landscape would then be defined by which side could better execute a leapfrog strategy.

These challenges and risks pose real difficulties. But none fundamentally invalidates the basic rationale or strategic logic of the strategy proposed here.

A Multilateral Effort

Finally, my recommendation is for a combined multilateral effort at leapfrog strategies in the areas I described earlier. My assumption is that the effort would primarily involve leading democratic techno-industrial powers, including Japan, countries of the European Union, and South Korea. The effort could also draw in several developing nations with emerging technology sectors and Persian Gulf countries putting major resources behind technological innovation.

Such a multilateral effort could take various organizational or procedural forms. In general, I have in mind an idea similar to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) but for technology leapfrogging—a truly integrated multinational effort in which research teams can be (but do not need to be) multinational in composition, in which member countries share the cost of the enterprise and—critically—in which they also share in the benefits.^[37] In the case of CERN, the initiative is a scientific one, seeking to maximize shared technology development through pooled knowledge and technology-sharing rather than private-sector revenue. Such a model might work for some specific leapfrog initiatives when the funding is more public and the technology more of a common good. Full members could have permanent rights to intellectual property generated by the coalition. But this approach will not be appropriate for areas in which private-sector capital is seeking a revenue-generating breakthrough.

Another interesting model for how the multilateral piece of this strategy could work is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Innovation Fund. This is billed as "the world's first multi-sovereign venture capital fund" and represents a collective version of something similar to the U.S. intelligence community's In-Q-Tel or other public-sector–funded venture initiatives.^[38] The Innovation Fund is a stand-alone, independent organization whose purpose is to invest in cutting-edge technology with security applications. The scale remains small—about €1 billion in the current programs—but reflects an effort by NATO partners to collaborate on innovation through investment in experiments.

I suggest a multilateral approach for several reasons. The first is resources: A $50 billion or $100 billion experimentation fund could be doubled or tripled in size with the participation of a significant number of other major technology powers. Given China's scale, the United States will be at a continual competitive disadvantage in key measures—size of its domestic market, numbers of science and engineering graduates, industrial heft, and more—unless it bands together with others.^[39] Multilateralism also makes sense for reasons of talent and creativity. The more countries involved, the more chance that the effort would tap into the thinking of the individual or group that makes the critical breakthrough in any area.

Third, a multilateral effort would also set the conditions for network influence by linking together many leading economies in the pursuit of a common set of new technologies. Participants would be far more likely to agree to shared standards, technologies, processes, and other determinants of network influence. The approach would bake a competitive network effect into the design of the research. It would reflect a decision on the part of dozens of major economies to build a shared technology ecosystem, one less subject to influence from China. That network effect would apply to nonmember states as well: The coalition would offer shared technology ecosystem options, with many advantages over China's options, to third parties.

Such an approach has risks and costs. One risk is technology theft—the more countries involved (including some with less-robust information security capabilities), the more danger that China could access all the work and findings of the coalition through its weakest cybersecurity link. One major cost would apply to the benefits of new discoveries: In pursuing a multilateral approach, the United States would surrender the possibility of monopolizing, for revenue or security terms, the value of innovations.

Even apart from the risks, managing such a complex multinational effort would be a tremendous challenge. Its architects and managers would have to navigate the politics, regulatory frameworks, and procurement and intellectual property protection standards of many different countries. Technology collaboration between nations has a mixed history, with the failures outnumbering the successes by a significant number. Yet success stories do exist, from the International Space Station to several European Union–wide projects. And, in any case, this proposal does not necessarily rely on multilateral pursuit of new technologies, only the multilateral investment in experiments. Dealing with intellectual property and other issues around benefiting from the breakthroughs will require tough negotiation, but that challenge is arguably not as severe as deep multilateral development of technologies themselves.

Meeting Core Objectives

A multilateral strategy for experimentation to catalyze technology leapfrogging would meet the basic objectives of U.S. technology strategy noted earlier. It would achieve the following:

• Keep the domestic U.S. foundations of scientific and technological innovation at a world-class level by placing the United States at the head of a global coalition undertaking major efforts in leapfrogging-oriented investments. Although the conduct and fruits of the research would be shared, U.S. institutions and individuals would play the leading role among the partners, and the result would be to bring new energy to U.S. innovation.
• As noted earlier, the approach would focus on the diffusion and application of the technologies as much as on the technology innovations themselves.
• Such a large-scale multilateral effort would be a tremendous and possibly decisive investment in ensuring that no major rival could obtain a monopoly position or a lasting, dominant advantage in any critical field of science and technology. Given the resources and techno-industrial acumen of the proposed coalition members, it would be very difficult for China to achieve such dominance over their collective efforts.
• As noted, the multilateral character of the effort would be a powerful spur to sustaining joint influence in technology networks, both within and beyond the member states.
• Some of the leapfrog efforts could be specifically designed to reduce U.S. vulnerabilities and dependencies in terms of critical materials or supply chains.

Conclusion

The United States and China are competing for the leading position in the scientific and technology domains that will define national power—and human economic and social life—in coming decades. I have argued that the character of China's technology engine means that confronting its brute strength head-on, especially in areas in which it has already stolen a march on the world, is a losing bet. A far more promising approach is to gather with other countries anxious to secure an alternative to a Sino-centric technology future and supercharge leapfrog innovations in a set of especially critical technology areas.

Notes

1. Greer and Yu, "Xi Believes China Can Win a Scientific Revolution"; Kroeber, "Unleashing 'New Quality Productive Forces'"; Engelke and Weinstein, "Assessing China's Approach to Technological Competition with the United States." Return to content ⤴
2. Sullivan, "Remarks by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan at the Special Competitive Studies Project Global Emerging Technologies Summit." Return to content ⤴
3. Edgerton, The Shock of the Old; Frey, The Technology Trap. Return to content ⤴
4. See, for example, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, "Critical Technology Tracker." Return to content ⤴
5. Mazarr, "A Vision of Success in the U.S.-China Rivalry," pp. 72–73. Return to content ⤴
6. These are drawn in part from Mazarr, "A Vision of Success in the U.S.-China Rivalry," pp. 76–77. Return to content ⤴
7. These do not reflect all the potential criteria for public-sector investments but only those that seem most relevant to the current case. See, for example, Warnke, Terre, and Ameiss, "A Methodology for Determining Public Investment Criteria"; de Vries, Bekkers, and Tummers, "Innovation in the Public Sector"; and Houtgraaf, Kruyen, and van Thiel, "Public Sector Creativity as the Origin of Public Sector Innovation." Return to content ⤴
8. Kennedy, "The Sources and Uses of U.S. Science Funding." Return to content ⤴
9. Engelke and Weinstein, "Assessing China's Approach to Technological Competition with the United States." Return to content ⤴
10. Zhang, Luo, and Xiang, "Strategic Emerging Industries and Innovation." Return to content ⤴
11. See, for example, Boullenois, Black, and Rosen, "Was Made in China 2025 Successful?" and Conroy, "How 'Made in China 2025' Helped Supercharge Scientific Development in China's Cities." Return to content ⤴
12. Bickenback et al., "Foul Play? On the Scale and Scope of Industrial Subsidies in China." Return to content ⤴
13. Medeiros and Polk, "China's New Economic Weapons." Return to content ⤴
14. Yong, "Industrial Espionage." Return to content ⤴
15. Atkinson, "China Is Rapidly Becoming a Leading Innovator in Advanced Industries"; Groenewegen-Lau and Laha, Controlling the Innovation Chain. Return to content ⤴
16. China Power Team, "Measuring China's Manufacturing Might." Return to content ⤴
17. Baldwin, "China Is the World's Sole Manufacturing Superpower." Return to content ⤴
18. Groenewegen-Lau, "Whole-of-Nation Innovation." Return to content ⤴
19. Symington, "China Is Winning. Now What?" Return to content ⤴
20. Groenewegen-Lau and Laha, Controlling the Innovation Chain. Return to content ⤴
21. Stern and Nguyen, "An American-Made iPhone." Return to content ⤴
22. Atkinson, "China Is Rapidly Becoming a Leading Innovator in Advanced Industries." Return to content ⤴
23. Funaiole, Hart, and Powers-Riggs, "China Dominates the Shipbuilding Industry." Return to content ⤴
24. See, for example, Park, Leahey, and Funk, "Papers and Patents Are Becoming Less Disruptive Over Time," and Piper, "Why Is Science Slowing Down?" Return to content ⤴
25. National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, "U.S. R&D Totaled $892 Billion in 2022; Estimate for 2023 Indicates Further Increase to $940 Billion." Return to content ⤴
26. Mandt, Seetharam, and Cheng, "Federal R&D Funding." Return to content ⤴
27. Harari, Leapfrogging the Competition. Return to content ⤴
28. Brezis, Krugman, and Tsiddon, "Leapfrogging." Return to content ⤴
29. Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. Return to content ⤴
30. Lee, China's Technological Leapfrogging and Economic Catch-Up. Return to content ⤴
31. Lee, "Economics of Technological Leapfrogging." See also Mathews, "Strategic Innovation Leapfrogging Through Linkage, Leverage, and Learning." Return to content ⤴
32. Lee, "Economics of Technological Leapfrogging," p. 129. Return to content ⤴
33. Howard Yu points out that second movers have traditionally been able to crash through supposed barriers to entry in many industries. He notes that "the average time it takes for developing nations to catch up with developed countries in their use of standard technology has dropped from well over one hundred years (for the spindle, when it was first invented in 1779) to thirteen (for the cell phone)" (Yu, Leap: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied. p. 63; compare pp. 8–9). Return to content ⤴
34. As just one example from the categories I will propose later, U.S. private-sector research funding in nuclear fusion is estimated at only $200 million to $500 million a year. See Ouyang, "China's Scaling Prowess Comes for Fusion." Return to content ⤴
35. Yu, Leap: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied, p. 11. Return to content ⤴
36. Lalwani and Marullo, "A Playbook for Industrial Policy"; Public Law 117-167, Division A, CHIPS Act of 2022. Return to content ⤴
37. CERN adheres to an open science standard requiring the open publication of its findings. Since this would be a competitive endeavor, presumably that aspect of the model would not apply. Return to content ⤴
38. North Atlantic Treaty Organization, "NATO Innovation Fund Makes First Investments in Future Deep Technologies." For more information, see the NATO Information Fund's homepage. Return to content ⤴
39. Campbell and Doshi, "Underestimating China." Return to content ⤴

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Topics

• China
• Emerging Technologies
• Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy
• United States