On this episode of ITK Radio, a conversation with Robert Atkinson.

Robert is the founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), recognized as the world’s top think tank for science and technology policy.

Robert leads a prolific team of policy analysts and fellows that is successfully shaping the debate and setting the agenda on a host of critical issues at the intersection of technological innovation and public policy.

He is an internationally recognized scholar and a widely published author whom The New Republic has named one of the “three most important thinkers about innovation,” Washingtonian Magazine has called a “tech titan,” Government Technology Magazine has judged to be one of the 25 top “doers, dreamers and drivers of information technology,” and the Wharton Business School has given the “Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award.”

President Clinton appointed Robert to the Commission on Workers, Communities, and Economic Change in the New Economy; the Bush administration appointed him chair of the congressionally created National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission; the Obama administration appointed him to the National Innovation and Competitiveness Strategy Advisory Board; as co-chair of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s China-US Innovation Policy Experts Group; to the US Department of Commerce’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship; and the Trump administration appointed him to the G7 Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence. The Biden administration appointed him as a member of the US State Department’s Advisory Committee on International Communications and Information, and a member of the Export-Import Bank of the United States' Council on China Competition.

Robert also served on the UK government’s Place Advisory Group to advise the Minister for Science, Research and Innovation on how policy can drive innovation in more regions. He is a member of the Polaris Council, a body of cross-sectoral, interdisciplinary science and technology policy experts who advise the US Government Accountability Office’s Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics (STAA) team on emergent and emerging issues.

You can find Robert on LinkedIn here.

Insights + Ideas:

+ "Free markets are irrational"

+ The power of cultural norms to shape commerce and communities

+ The increase of distributed teams and leaders not working in an organization's headquarters

+ The need to radically change the US building codes and allow for more 3D printed of homes

+ Why the United States needs an advanced industrial policy to compete with China

+ Issue Brief: Time for Congressional Action to Speed the Arrival of Self-Driving Cars by Ashley Johnson

+ Issue Brief: A Policymaker’s Guide to Connected Cars by Alan McQuinn + Daniel Castro

+ Issue Brief: Semiconductors, CHIPS for America, and Appropriations in the US Innovation and Competition Act (S. 1260) Congressional Research Service

+ On the need to simplify communications and embrace: "You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother." -- Albert Einstein

+ "We are in competition with China, and we should recognize that.”

+ "We are in a cold war, which is a good framework to understand the world."

+ "Every industry now is a tech industry."

+ What we should be thinking about AI

+ Extraordinary Attorney Woo Netflix

+ Mao's China and the cold war by Chen Jian UNC Press

+ Russians Among Us by Gordon Corera Harper Collins

+ ITIF Event: Reviving America’s Hamiltonian Tradition to Win the Economic Competition With China on Thursday, April 27, 2023 - 8:30 am to 4:00 pm ET. RSVP here.