Sacramento’s Smart Move : California: The state’s special council on science and technology is a step toward keeping us competitive in global trade.

California’s is the sixth-largest economy in the world. Since 1950, many of America’s most innovative and best-known electronics and computer firms have been born in the state. California’s aerospace and defense industries have dramatically expanded during the last 50 years. Yet Sacramento has just begun to establish effective policy for maintaining and enhancing the state’s technological competitiveness.

In November, the Legislature called on some of the state’s top academic research institutions to establish the California Council on Science and Technology. Twenty-one of the state’s most distinguished scientists, scholars and industrialists sit on the council.

The Legislature assigned the council clear-cut missions: to provide California decision-makers with “independent and objective advice and findings” on public policy issues involving science and technology; to identify the long-range research needed to sustain California’s economic development and competitiveness; and to assess the nature and kinds of technology transfers between the private sector and universities.

The California Council on Science and Technology was a product of a five-year examination by the legislators of the state’s technological needs. Two approaches were formulated.

The remedial approach is embodied in the Competitive Technology Program, which is directed from within the state Commerce Department. The program provides direct state grants to develop marketable technologies and to accelerate their delivery to market. In its first year, it handed out less than $7 million. The value of grants dispensed in fiscal ’90 is not expected to exceed that amount.

Regrettably, this is barely enough to help initiate or tide over a few infant industries whose growth will require substantial infusions of venture capital, skilled workmanship and state-of-the-art facilities. But it is, after all, only a beginning.

The Council on Science and Technology is the offspring of the second--or diagnostic--approach. Among the issues the council initially plans to study are:

--Science and mathematics education in elementary and secondary schools.

--The reliability and quality of science and engineering personnel and facilities in California.

--The use of science and technology to solve regional problems, among them air pollution, water quality and quantity, treatment and disposal of toxic materials and traffic.

--Means for gathering more exact information about the business environment in California, particularly in the technology sector.

At present, the council’s budget is underwritten by its five founding institutions of higher education--the University of California and the California State University systems, Caltech, Stanford and the University of Southern California. To fund its studies, however, the council will be counting heavily on the private sector and philanthropic foundations, from which it draws nearly half its members.

But the council will still have to look to local governments and government agencies for project support. This is because California is competing against nations whose research centers are better-subsidized and whose work forces are better-educated. The overseas competition is already fierce, particularly along the Pacific Rim.

Retired Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, former chairman and chief executive officer of Westmark Systems Inc., based in Austin, Tex., has clearly articulated the problem and its solution. “Global competition has created new ground rules for technology. The keys to success are speed and teamwork. We’ve been too slow, too fragmented, too uncoordinated and too adversarial. We’ve got to be faster, more focused and more collaborative.”

The California Council on Science and Technology is a sound step toward these goals.