🔧Imagine... Invention That Stays Home🔧
💡 Imagined Endstate:
A future where innovations conceived in island labs or Pacific universities are manufactured locally or regionally, so that value, jobs, and learning stay in our communities, not exported with the idea.
📚 Source:
Yutong, D. (2025, September 3). Innovation Lightbulb: The Growing Gap Between U.S. Technology Innovation and Production. Center for Strategic & International Studies. Link.
💥 What’s the Big Deal:
In 1995, the U.S. had a $13 billion trade surplus in advanced technology products (ATPs)📈. By 2024, that flipped dramatically to a $297 billion deficit, meaning the U.S. invents a lot, but outsources much of the actual making. The gap between invention and manufacture means that intellectual property, patents, and designs are exported, while the jobs, supply chains, and industrial learning go elsewhere.
For Pacific Islands, this gap is instructive. If we build innovation ecosystems, universities, labs, startups, but send all production to East Asia or elsewhere, we lose not just economic benefit, but resilience. We lose supply chain sovereignty, skilled labor accumulation, and the ability to adapt tech locally in storms or disruptions. Dominant IP export with minimal local manufacturing leaves us dependent🌐, vulnerable, and unable to capture the full rewards of our own creativity.
Bridging this gap requires investing in advanced manufacturing infrastructure, local scaling support, skills training in production engineering and tech transfer, and regional manufacturing clusters🛡. Only then can Pacific innovators invent, produce, and benefit at home. Otherwise, we remain idea contributors, not builders of our own futures.
#InnovationGap, #MadeHere, #PacificTech, #ValueChainControl, #BuildNotExport, #ResilientIslands,#IMSPARK,
