Sloan Foundation to Fund Study on U.S. Competitiveness

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation will give nearly $3 million to five universities to study the problems that U.S. companies have competing in the international marketplace, the New York-based foundation was scheduled to announce today.

“Competitiveness is an issue that a lot of people are writing about,” said David J. Teece, head of UC Berkeley’s Consortium on Competitiveness and Cooperation, which will manage the $2.97-million grant. “We’re not doing as well as we could, as well as we have historically and as well as the leading nations we trade with.

“The U.S. economy is in decline . . . and it’s not necessary. If we want to set a new course, we can.”

Faculty from Berkeley, Stanford, Columbia, Harvard and MIT will participate, representing a variety of disciplines, including economics, management and engineering.

The study is unusual because it requires extensive cooperation from U.S. industry, said Ralph E. Gomory, president of the Sloan Foundation. The chief executives of five companies--General Electric, General Motors, Hewlett Packard, IBM and Xerox--have guaranteed cooperation by their firms, he said.

During the 3-to-5-year study, the corporations will help the consortium decide what issues to examine, will provide data and will give “a perspective from people actually involved in competition on a global basis,” Teece said.

“You can’t deal with competitiveness in a quick and ad hoc fashion,” Gomory said. “Scholarship without contact with reality isn’t very useful.”

The grant is the Sloan Foundation’s largest to a university in 25 years. The private foundation is a major funding source for college and university research in science, economics, engineering, public policy and management.