Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech shows the path forward, particularly for conservatives and Republicans in the United States, for how a stronger national government role is critical to winning the race for global innovation advantage.

Since the economy has still not fully recovered from the Great Recession, the challenge for the next administration will be two-fold: restoring U.S. global innovation leadership and driving productivity growth. To achieve robust job growth, the United States needs a growing and competitive “traded sector engine” powered by innovation. America also needs strong productivity growth because it is the surest way of addressing the fiscal challenge. ITIF’s Winning the Race memos one through nine laid out a specific and actionable list of policy recommendations to help America win the innovation race, in areas from tax and trade to digital networks and science. But the real challenge is implementing needed policies. This memo discusses the challenges, principally in the realm of ideas and worldviews, that act as barriers to implementation and proposes one idea to overcome them.

In the coming weeks, a plethora of reports will emerge enumerating the most urgent priorities for the next Administration and Congress to address. TechElect’s Six Steps to Jobs, Prosperity, and Innovation cuts through the thicket and succinctly highlights the six key steps that should be the starting point for policymakers after the November 6 election.

Why would we automatically expect that America can win in clean energy when it’s losing in so many others? The answer is: we shouldn’t. For all the gains made in clean energy over the last few years, its future looks ominous. To say otherwise is disingenuous. Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. America losing the global clean energy race is not set in stone. The United States must triple its investments in innovation to make clean energy cheap and competitive everywhere. It must aggressively fight international green mercantilism to level the playing field. And it must implement a cohesive national manufacturing strategy that will help all manufacturing sectors not just clean energy.

We need a real debate about the proper role of the government as a partner to help the private sector in winning the race for global innovation advantage. Stale debates about "makers and takers" and "who made this or that" miss the key issue: how would each candidate propose to structure federal policy so it helps our businesses win in intensely competitive global markets? This means helping businesses field a workforce with skills second to none and supporting science and technology so firms have access to the flow of innovation to help them to get to market with globally competitive products. While America has fallen behind and lost our game, it's still possible we can get back in the race and create the millions of well-paying jobs that come with winning. But only if Washington takes these challenges seriously and examines the global race closely. And that begins with an honest and on point debate about how to win the innovation race.