Learn Foreign Languages and Catch Innovations at the Source
One of the main concerns of Congress and the American people these days is that life is getting better in Japan faster than it is in the United States. Many in management circles place the blame on the American worker. That is, the Japanese labor force is more capable and harder-working than its American counterpart; auto workers in Nagoya are more productive than auto workers in Detroit.
While there may be some validity to this line of reasoning, the problem really has little to do with American workers and how hard they work.
Instead, the comparative decline in the quality of American life is primarily a result of the ethnocentricity of our educational and scientific communities.
How can this be?
Last spring, at the behest of Congress, a group of industry and academic leaders convened to discuss the cause of our burgeoning trade deficit. Among other things, the symposium concluded that a key part of the problem was the rapid diffusion of innovations in foreign countries. It used to be that when an American company had a new idea, it took a long time for foreign competitors to imitate the innovation. American companies thereby enjoyed a substantial competitive edge in the world marketplace. But now companies around the world can accurately copy an American product or production process in a matter of days, stealing our innovations before we recoup our investments in them.
The thinking at the congressional symposium rested on a false premise--that America produces innovations while other countries do not. People in other countries do produce new ideas. Our competitive disadvantage results not from our neighbors’ ability to copy our ideas, but from our inability to copy theirs. Japanese scientists have access to Japanese ideas and American ideas, while American scientists have access only to American ideas. This is true in all scientific and educational fields. And it’s an American problem--not a Japanese, German or Korean problem.
Two examples well make the point. Last spring a Business Week cover story reported a key breakthrough in superconductors made by K. Alex Muller, a physicist from IBM’s Zurich research laboratories. Americans are now about a year behind other scientists because, according to the magazine, Muller published his paper in a German journal not widely read in the United States. And some Americans who did read it doubted the findings--and now regret their skepticism.
Similarly, marketing scholars in this country ignore foreign journals in their field. A recent international marketing journal noted that American surveys are “limited to articles and papers published in journals and conference proceedings that are reasonably accessible to both academicians and practitioners. Thus, although journals like the Revue Franchise du Marketing contain relevant articles, they were considered too inaccessible for inclusion.”
“Too inaccessible!” This is sad commentary indeed on American marketing science, my own field.
Much of this problem is due to relaxed foreign-language requirements at all levels in our education system. Fewer than half the U.S. colleges and universities now require foreign-language study for a bachelor’s degree, down from nearly 90% in 1966. So American scientists can talk to IBM computers and read printouts, but they can’t talk to French colleagues or read German scientific papers.
Even worse than our lack of capability is our lack of desire. We don’t think that it’s important to keep up with innovations in other countries. Indeed, we really do believe that American scientists have a monopoly on new ideas.
Rather than spending government resources protecting our ideas, our dollars and energies would be better spent learning foreign languages and thereby trading ideas with our neighbors. Creativity results only from a free flow of ideas. We’re paying the price of this scientific ethno-centricity. Research and development expenditures in this country have declined to dangerous levels because those expenditures of late haven’t been good investments. In 1987, for the first time in a decade, growth in research and development expenditures will be lower than growth of the economy.
So in the United States, even if people work harder, life still won’t get better unless we begin to pay attention to scientific developments in other countries. And we can do that only if we reinstitute foreign-language requirements at all levels of our education system.
