A gathering storm?

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: cannot prevent America from capitalising on their inventions with better business models.

That points to his next insight, that the commercialisation, diffusion and use of inventions is of more value to companies and societies than the initial bright spark. America’s sophisticated marketing, distribution, sales and customer-service systems have long given it a decisive advantage over rivals, such as Japan in the 1980s, that began to catch up with its technological prowess. For America to retain this sort of edge, then, what the country needs is better MBAs, not more PhDs.

America also has another advantage: the extraordinary willingness of its consumers to try new things. Mr Bhidé insists that such “venturesome consumption” is a vital counterpart to the country’s entrepreneurial business culture.

Is he right? The lack of long-term data means this has become “a quasi-theological dispute”, says Robert Litan of the Kauffman Foundation, a charity that provided some funding for Mr Bhidé’s work. But the contrarian should not be dismissed out of hand. For a start, he is right to argue against making a fetish of invention. Edison did not invent the light bulb and Ford did not think up the motor car, but both came up with the business-model innovations required to profit from those marvels.

And as GE’s Mr Immelt likes to say, his firm is not great at invention, but it is outstanding at “turning $50m businesses into billion-dollar businesses”. Adam Segal of the Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, points out that the sensors that America’s soldiers use are no longer secret technology, but they use them in sophisticated ways that rivals cannot copy easily.

There is another reason to take the current “techno-nationalism”, as Mr Bhidé calls it, with a grain of salt. Even if China and India really are surging ahead in the number of technical graduates (and research by Vivek Wadhwa of Harvard University casts doubt on the quality of many of those degrees), innovation is not a zero-sum game. On the contrary, there is growing evidence that the rise of the giant emerging economies may even help those companies from the rich world that take a global approach to innovation.