A commonly asked question during the summer is, “What are you taking to the beach to read?” At the top of my list is Fareed Zakaria’s new book, The Post American World Release 2.0. I had already planned to do a future blog post on the book, but once I saw last week’s NPR interview, “What Does a ‘Post-American World’ Look Like?” I knew the lead paragraph from the interview was too priceless not to share:

“Thirty years ago, the United States dominated the world politically, economically and scientifically. But today?

‘The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai, the biggest factory in the world is in China, the largest oil refinery is in India, the largest investment fund in the world is in Abu Dhabi, the largest Ferris wheel in the world is in Singapore,’ notes Fareed Zakaria. ‘And … more troublingly, [the United States is] also losing [its] key grip on indices such as patent creation, scientific creations and things like that — which are really harbingers of future economic growth.’ ”

You won’t want to miss the entire interview. Here’s the link.

I hope the interview – and his book – will spur increased dialog about the competitiveness debate that I’ve blogged about previously. I welcome your thoughts and comments.

For those of you who are as passionate as I am about innovation and competitiveness, you won’t want to miss Fareed Zakaria’s article “Innovate Better” in the June 13th issue of Time.

The article reinforces the important point that all Americans need to understand: The U.S. is losing ground in innovation and the job growth that comes with it. We are no longer a global leader in comparison with other countries on important measurable factors, which we referenced in a previous blog post: Competitiveness: How Do We Get More of it?

Zakaria only had to use the word “politicized” one time to spark an important point for me. The role of the government in supporting and participating in the “ecosystem that encourages technological breakthroughs” was not debated earlier in our nation’s history. But it’s a heated debate today. How do we take politics out of the decision process and learn again how to rally around promising areas for technological advancement? We did that with the development of the Internet and we did that in the race to the moon.

We have even more daunting challenges due to the deep hole our nation’s economy is still in today. It’s not new news that corporate America seems to be climbing out of the recession, but unemployment is very likely to remain at unacceptable levels. This is especially troubling with no clear job creation solutions in sight.

Zakaria summarizes on a critical point: that the need to find new ways to rebuild American education, revive high-end manufacturing and rebuild our infrastructure may be the most important innovation of all.

All of these things mean that innovation is more important than ever to growth and prosperity in the U.S. Thanks to Fareed Zakaria for keeping front and center two important questions that remain to be answered: Where do we focus innovation? And, how do we fund it?