Global and country findings
- China’s lead continues to grow
- China significantly strengthened its standing in the middle of the last decade
- The US is losing the strong historical advantage that it has built
- China has built up potential monopoly positions in scientific expertise and top performing institutions
- India accelerates: India now ranks in the top 5 countries for 45 of 64 technologies
- The UK ranks in the top 5 countries for 36 technologies—a decline from 44 technologies in last year’s results
- The European Union, as a whole, is a competitive technological player
- Germany is the top-performing European Union country
- South Korea’s performance shows that Japan has work to do
- Iran excels at defence-sensitive technologies
- Australia has improved in some technologies and slipped in others
- AUKUS—the trilateral security and technology partnership involving the US, the UK and Australia28—closes the gap in some Pillar 2–relevant technologies, but not all
Technology monopoly risk metric results
- Scientific breakthroughs and research innovations in key defence technologies are increasingly likely to occur in China:
- China’s research lead in advanced materials and manufacturing technologies grows
Institutional findings: US tech companies, government agencies and CAS
- Private-sector research is increasingly concentrated in US technology giants
- Private sector research was more diverse between 2003-2007
- The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) is the global science and research powerhouse
- Government agencies and national laboratories feature prominently
- Chinese companies play a relatively small role in the global research ecosystem
It really shows that you get more bang for your buck when you have a government institutions doing the research vs government just giving profit driven companies money to do research as in a means of doing R&D. The company as a profit driven entity is just going to take a share as profit for itself at every turn and then do with the rest the same or less than what the government institution would have done anyway, because it didn’t need to concern itself with maximizing shareholder profit.