As a (Swiss) outsider, let me try to analyze the key elements advanced by both politicians addressing the first and most crucial question "What policies will best ensure that America remains a world leader in innovation?":
Obama: "... we must create an environment where invention, innovation, and industry can flourish. We can work together to create an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, and skills for American workers."
He hits the nail on the head in prioritizing invention over innovation -- yet by fostering an economy built on US-only manufacturing, energy, and worker's skills, he either promptly dismisses the importance of invention he just stressed, or insinuates that inventions and inventors should be imported...
Obama: "... 100,000 science and math teachers over the next decade. These teachers will meet the urgent need to train one million additional STEM graduates over the next decade."
Exactly what I feared: his heavy, if not exclusive, reliance on teachers tends to indicate that, as a pure intellectual and despite giving invention priority over innovation, he may actually neither understand the fundamental difference between invention and innovation, nor, so much the more, the foremost importance of invention.
An example may illustrate my view: in the early twenties, an immigrated Russian aviation engineer, Igor Sikorsky, founded a US company that was going to produce the worlds first fully functional helicopter; another immigrant, Werner von Braun, became the initiator of the US space saga; and still another immigrant, Albert Einstein, led America to the first atomic bomb.
However, are you sure that all these are genuine inventions? Nope! Neither the chopper (invented by Mother Nature), nor the rocket (invented by the Chinese), and not even the bomb, which resulted from collective fundamental research, were inventions according to the underlying meaning of the term 'to invent' -- which stems from 'inventory' and means 'to gather an inventory', whereby the substantive 'inventor' designs the gatherer. Inventory of what? Of the state of the art, i.e. of all existing solutions pertaining to a given subject matter -- whereby the challenge consists of combining two or more existing solutions into a new and more efficient one.
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=27cddc8ff3efbe9b0d2efec403910612
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