International collaborations embed American scientists and students in vibrant, globally collaborative networks that strengthen the U.S. science, technology, and innovation (STI) enterprise, while benefiting both America and the world. Because such benefits have not been systematically explored in the United States, we present a framework for organizing and enumerating them, with national-level examples provided to illustrate scientific, economic, health, national security, educational, societal, and diplomacy and development advantages that can result from international STI collaborations. Our objectives in presenting this organizing structure are threefold. First, the framework can help those in government, academic, and private sectors who make decisions with national impact better understand how and what kinds of positive outcomes can result from international STI cooperation. Second, given the distributed and decentralized nature of the U.S. STI community, the framework can serve as a starting point for subnational decision makers to identify benefits of STI internationalization at their operational scales. Third, this organizing structure and its examples can serve as a call to action for scientists to more clearly articulate to decision makers and the public how working in areas of mutual scientific interest with international colleagues can advance U.S. national, regional, local, or institutional interests.

As a group of individuals who have worked across national and global science landscapes for many decades, we were motivated to develop a framework for better understanding and communicating the benefits of international science,1 technology, and innovation collaboration to the United States. The global STI system has seen dramatic change in the last several decades. For example, it is now marked by worldwide growth in investment that is significantly reducing U.S. global scientific market share, e.g., in expenditures, globally mobile students, publications, patents, and technology revenue.”2 3 The construction of advanced STI infrastructure is now more often built outside the United States by other nations or consortia. And the geography of scientific knowledge creation and use has shown new dynamics within and across many world regions.4 5 These changes have kindled a dialogue in the United States about how the nation, facing both a more worldwide distribution of STI excellence and domestic budget constraints, can best adapt to the twenty-first-century environment of international partnerships and globally distributed knowledge networks.6 7 8 9 10 Missing thus far from this dialogue has been a comprehensive and deliberate exploration of how international STI collaboration provides benefits to America at many levels.

We undertake such an effort by presenting an organizing structure or framework for such benefits that we hope achieves three objectives. First, given the complexity of the U.S. STI enterprise, this framework can help decision makers (including government officials at all levels, as well as academic and private sector leaders) better understand how and what kinds of positive national impacts can result from international STI cooperation. We do this by providing examples within our framework of who can benefit, in what ways, from which types of activities undertaken by different sets of U.S. and foreign partners working in various policy sectors. Second, the framework can serve as a starting point for subnational decision makers to identify benefits of STI internationalization at their operational scales. Third, this organizing structure and its examples can serve as a call to action for scientists to more clearly articulate the benefits of their international collaborations to decision makers and the public.

The Underappreciated Value of International Scientific Collaborations at Home

The United States has been slow among developed and emerging economy countries to recognize how increased international collaboration can advance domestic science excellence.11 12 13 This is likely due to America’s historic STI dominance, relative geographic isolation, and critically, to a complex STI community that is large, diverse, and decentralized. Much U.S. scientific activity is of a bottom-up, merit-based nature, driven by scientists working in domestic or international teams to address specific scientific challenges, rather than being dictated by centralized, top-down mandates.

The nation distributes federal support for basic scientific research from a number of agencies and across many universities and research institutions. U.S. higher education is a private or state, not a federal, responsibility, so academic STI internationalization is characterized by strong competition among states and institutions, few national policy levers, and little coordination among and within institutions.”14 Likewise, the various U.S. government science agencies operate in a relatively decentralized manner, undertaking international activities to meet their different missions with little policy direction, and with limited central and strategic coordination.”15 16 Congress and State Houses respond to local constituencies, yielding few broad national advocates for international STI collaboration. Finally, because STI results and impacts, especially those that occur in overseas collaborations, are primarily communicated across networks of scientific professionals, little feedback on international STI outcomes is available in forms that are accessible to decision makers or the general public.

Given these historical and structural considerations, we chose to focus on benefits derived from federal government and university involvement in international STI activities that advance national objectives such as national security, economic vitality, and diplomacy.17 We focus on Americans going abroad for STI collaboration because this has received less attention than the impact of foreign STI researchers and students working in America. We recognize that the mutual benefit realized by the collaborating foreign partner(s) is essential to this STI cooperation, but we do not address that here.

Crafting a Framework to Capture Benefits of International STI Collaborations

Our framework organizes benefits into seven sectors (i.e., scientific, economic, health, diplomacy and development, national security, educational, and societal) with distinct (or overlapping) policy drivers and potential policy outcomes (e.g., leading, accelerating, building, safeguarding, sustaining).18 Because our primary objective is to inform those whose decisions have major impacts at a national level, most of the examples in Table 1 focus on how international collaboration in national programs can help the United States. The examples illustrate an overarching benefit of international collaboration, i.e., it yields outcomes that no one nation could achieve alone. For example, international groups can leverage more resources (e.g., funding, expertise, facilities) to accomplish something faster and can combine diverse contributions (e.g., unique expertise, data, phenomena, facilities) to allow specialization and reduce duplication. Such collaborations can also increase collective participation (e.g., comprehensive global or regional monitoring) to yield more rigorous scientific synthesis and shared responsibility for future action. The examples also document how international STI collaboration can strengthen relationships (e.g., with improved networks and collaboration tools, and increased trust, generosity, and cultural understanding) with mutual scientific and diplomatic benefit to all participants. Finally, the examples sampled in Table 1 demonstrate the wide potential scope and complexity of projects, with various types and numbers of international partners, and diverse types of scientific activities undertaken to yield the set of benefits described.

Many of the activities cited in Table 1 are part of a rich fabric of cooperation that produces benefits across multiple sectors. For example, in the category of societal benefits, when U.S. engineers work with their Japanese counterparts on building safety, they contribute to society’s resilience to earthquakes by co-designing and sharing data from experiments in Japan on the world’s largest “shake table,” subjecting large, sensor-laden reinforced concrete buildings to different types and severity of shaking. A recent U.S.-Japan workshop on risk communication yielded additional societal benefit by providing cross-cultural insights into how to increase effective engagement with the public in natural disaster preparedness and response. Universities in the earthquake-prone nations of Japan, New Zealand, Chile, and the United States are linked in a virtual network that generates scientific benefit by sharing data on earthquake impacts on various kinds of buildings, as well as educational benefits to the participating countries by engaging their future engineers in jointly taught classes and international collaborative frameworks. The graphic of nanoHUB users around the world (Figure 1, see also Table 1), illustrates another international collaboration that yields multiple types of benefits. In addition to building a community of shared practice around nanotechnology safeguards that spreads the costs of nanotechnology safety across many countries, a main focus of nanoHUB is distributing nanoscience educational materials from around the world and providing access to computing and simulation tools in many areas of nanoscience. The United States benefits from the resultant global knowledge networks and thriving national and international educational and research collaborations in the pre-competitive areas of nanoscience.

We highlight direct positive impacts of STI collaboration for the wellbeing of Americans and emphasize how U.S. leadership in solving global STI challenges can benefit the world. We hope that our focus on the benefits of leveraging increased worldwide STI excellence provides a positive counterbalance to concerns that such global STI growth is primarily a threat that diminishes U.S. advantage.19 We recognize that global technology markets are fiercely competitive, that there are ongoing threats to American intellectual property, and that the nation needs to safeguard its technology for national security. But these concerns need not interfere with global engagement—many safeguards exist and are continually reinforced. There are numerous examples of international cooperation in pre-competitive research that are successfully integrated into domestic technology programs and subsequently implemented by U.S. business and government agencies. Many American industries have adopted a strategy of open collaboration to stay competitive.20 Given the breakneck speed at which STI developments emerge and expand across the globe, we endorse the view that “American security and prosperity now depend on maintaining active engagement with worldwide developments in science and technology, and with the global economy.”21 Embedding American scientists and engineers in robust, global STI networks can add value by placing local knowledge in global contexts and by bringing global knowledge back for local use.22

Embedding American scientists and engineers in robust, global STI networks can add value by placing local knowledge in global contexts and by bringing global knowledge back for local use.

Our second objective in presenting the information in Table 1 is that it serves as a starting point to help various subnational decision makers and stakeholder groups better understand the potential benefits of international STI collaboration at the levels at which they operate. Each state has a unique set of universities, industries, populations, and political and economic drivers. To paraphrase the late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, the states can be America’s “laboratories of STI globalization,” where state policies allow experimentation and local fine-tuning, delivering benefits from each state’s distinctive comparative advantages.

We know that the map of innovation has been “spiky,” with a few key regions (e.g., San Francisco and Boston) dominating.23 Looking ahead, America’s challenge is to sustain existing hubs and incubate new ones that can achieve site-specific local-to-global STI integration; this is especially pressing as more emerging economies devise their own recipes for innovation’s “special sauce,” that is, mega-cities that co-locate workforce, intellectual capital, investment in science, and industrial growth.24 Finally, students, researchers, and technologists are embedded within institutional, local, state, and national structures that vary in how their policies on international STI engagement yield benefit within a global context.24 25 26 Because the dynamic global STI landscape offers American institutions, regions, and states the potential to realize tremendous value in a global context, we encourage these groups to freely consider or modify our framework as they develop their international agendas.

As an example, one can consider in Table 1 the international science and engineering internships that yield national economic benefit by bringing into the national workforce U.S. students with globally relevant work skills, cultural experience, and professional networks. Such internships can also provide great benefit at subnational scales. For example, at a state level, public university international engagement, private sector strengths, demography, and geography can make certain regions of the world natural partners. Students returning from internships in those foreign regions are more able to work in culturally diverse teams, are more knowledgeable about business approaches, customs, and markets of countries there, and are plugged into border-spanning networks and partnerships in that region. They can help meet local American needs by using the international skills, savvy, and connections they acquired during their internships to bolster focused international ventures of a state’s private sector.

Our final objective is that our framework serves as a call to action that stimulates internationally engaged scientists to better document the positive impacts of their international activities at national, state, local, and institutional levels. U.S. scientists and institutions have strong traditions of free scientific inquiry with international colleagues and of training students from around the world. Many are part of global scientific networks and clamor for facilitation of bottom-up international STI collaboration. Better articulation of the positive impacts of such collaboration is needed to inform national priorities, policies (e.g., on visas, intellectual property, data sharing), and funding (e.g., to globally link students, researchers, institutions, databases, and facilities), as well as to build support for and reduce impediments to international STI engagement at subnational levels.

Broad support is needed at many levels for those in the American STI community who want to “go global.” Thus there is an urgent need for scientists to help decision makers and especially citizens understand and value not just the scientific benefits of international research, but also how it meets basic human and national needs.28 In the “Public Messaging” column in Table 1, we provide model language, as suggested by Alan Alda at the 2014 AAAS Annual Meeting, which we believe is straightforward, compelling, and linked to the lives of the American people.29 We emphasize outcomes that can motivate domestic action and political consensus and can be conducive to international cooperation (e.g., national pride, economic and social wellbeing, national security, generosity, the value of knowledge, civics). With the language in that column as a guide, we challenge our fellow scientists to describe, in ways that their relatives, neighbors, institutional leaders, and civic leaders can understand, how their collaborating in international science helps America.

A Forward-looking, Dynamic Conversation

We welcome discussion and further exploration of the benefits of international STI engagement by decision makers at all levels and across all sectors, as well as by scientific professional societies and scientists themselves. We see these activities as an essential part of ongoing consideration of how to develop a broad, comprehensive, globally framed strategy for U.S. STI, as well as the supportive strategies at subnational levels. We hope that our framework will contribute to the nation’s narrative about how the United States can “lead through collaboration” to build and sustain broad and deep partnerships of mutual interest that keep our scientists and students at the forefront of STI, while bolstering synergistic cooperation for the benefit of America and the world.30

Organizational Framework

Organizational Framework for Elucidating Seven Types of Benefits of International Science, Technology, and Innovation Collaboration for America

Endnotes