Brad Feld (actually, his uncle Charlie) says “we need another Sputnik” to spur the next great wave of innovation, which in turn will keep us competitive with China and India.
I predict it will be something around alternative energy. There is absolutely no way China, which wants all the trappings of the good life in the West, can ever hope to achieve it on a carbon-based economy. Pollution there is outrageously bad, and all the cheap labor in the world won’t buy enough oil for everyone there who wants to own a car. Even though they’re building coal power plants at an astounding pace, they still have trouble with unreliable electricity (and especially hot water) in even major urban areas like Shanghai.
The other thing is, though a lot of manufacturing is being done in China, they’re tremendously inefficient in their use of energy for industrial purposes. So if they are to have a hope of catching up with the West, they’re going to have to have different energy policies than what powered the West into and through the industrial revolution.
So they are investing a lot of R&D in developing new energy sources, and it wouldn’t surprise me if a shock-the-world moment like Sputnik – cold fusion, say, or 10x improvement in fuel cells – comes out of China or India in the next 10 years.
(And by the way, the demand for coal is killing miners at a horrific rate. Workplace safety and environmental protection are the sleeping giants of the Chinese citizenry. If and when a democratic revolution takes place there, will be driven by specific issues like these, not abstract concepts like freedom and liberty which so seem to concern the West.)