米国競争力協議会（Council on Competitiveness: COC）報告書

Service Economy Skills

People sometimes have a misconception that most service jobs are low-skilled, low-wage, no-benefits jobs in fast food joints and beauty parlors. But it is time for a reality check. During the period that America was making a transition to a service economy, the GDP more than doubled from $6 trillion in 1991 to nearly $14 trillion today, and the economy accommodated millions of new college graduates.₂₁

Service Economy: Engine of Economic and Job Growth

The service economy is an engine of wealth creation. It now accounts for the lion's share of U.S. jobs and gross domestic product.₂₂ The stereotype of low-skilled service jobs actually represents only a small percentage—just 22 percent—of the large and growing service employment in the United States. More than 30 percent of service jobs are in the highest skill category of professional, technical, managerial and administrative occupations which tend to be knowledge-intensive, using the latest collaboration and communications technologies.₂₃
Services account for 75 percent of all jobs in the United States today. And virtually all of the projected employment growth in the U.S. economy until 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, will occur in service-providing industries. Professional and business services, as well as health care services, are the areas of largest expected growth. Who are these service workers? They are doctors and lawyers, architects and accountants, CEOs and scientists, branding and marketing specialists, software engineers and computer programmers, office workers and educators, transportation and logistics providers, health and human services workers, plumbers and electricians. These are the workers who will drive America's economic growth today and in the future.₂₄ The service economy accounts for a large and growing share of America's economic pie.

Services Drive Demand for Higher Skills

According to Professor Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University, from the Civil War until the 1970s, the United States was the world's most successful mass-production economy; the very best at producing standardized goods and services at the least cost and selling them at the lowest price.
These mass-production successes required rigorous discipline and narrow skill. As the world got richer, the competition shifted rapidly to new kinds of added value that required new kinds of skill. More of the value-added of manufacturing began to come from the services associated with production: marketing; financing; customer service and managing quality; variety; customization; innovation; convenience; novelty; and speeded operations.₂₆
This approach to the service economy embraces, and does not exclude, manufacturing. To a large extent, the demarcation line between services and manufacturing is a relic of an outmoded data collection system. The most competitive companies today bundle products and services—and with good reason.
With the rapid pace of technology diffusion, even advanced products can be commoditized. Integrating services into the mix changes the value hierarchy and transforms the revenue stream.
In the wireless industry, the profits come from voice and data services, and not from the sale of phones and devices. Jet engine manufacturers do not just sell engines and spare parts, but also propulsion services that continue to generate revenues through the product's lifespan—five times more revenues than the original sales price. Manufacturing companies are transforming themselves from product suppliers into solutions providers and competing on customer satisfaction and innovation.
What they need are workers with the skills to meet these new demands. That growth in value-added services is driving demand for higher-skilled and more educated workers.
In 1973, only 28 percent of prime-age workers had any post-secondary education. Today, 59 percent attended some type of post-secondary institution.₂₇
The service economy is creating a need for new and more complex skill sets—creativity, problem solving, communications, customer relations, computing, collaboration and teamwork. Increasingly, all workers have to be adaptive and flexible—able to respond rapidly and with independent initiative. These postindustrial jobs in legal, finance, business consulting, health care, education and other knowledge-intensive service industries require higher levels of communications and problem-solving skills because their work entails higher levels of human interaction and customized, often personalized, responses to challenges and opportunities.₂₈ Americans live and work in a service economy, yet are only just beginning to teach and train students and workers to improve service sector productivity and innovation.

The Innovation Advantage

In this new global economy, America faces highly effective competition not just for low-skilled, low-wage jobs, but also for lower-wage, highly-skilled ones as well. Other countries are building innovation ecosystems that have been successful in generating new knowledge and patents, producing technical talent in large quantities, attracting higher-value investment, and building local industrial capacity in cutting-edge technologies and services. There is no question that the capabilities of innovator nations are getting better—in some cases, much better.
Consider that:

•  R&D employment by American multinationals overseas is growing?about 76 percent during the last 10 years—while the growth in R&D employment by foreign multinationals in the United States peaked in 1999 and has been declining.
•  The U.S. share of the world's scientists and engineers is projected to fall from 40 percent in 1975 to 15 percent in 2010.₂₉
•  America's share of global foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows has declined from its peak of 21 percent in 2000 to 11 percent in 2005, although FDI inflows to the United States have recently been on the rise.
•  In 2000, the United States accounted for 20 percent of the world's high technology exports while China accounted for only 4 percent. As recent as 2005, however, the U.S. share of global high-tech exports dropped to 15 percent while China's share increased to more than 14 percent.₃₀

In recognition of this changing competitive landscape, Congress passed the America COMPETES Act in 2007, which sought to restore technological leadership with significantly increased funding for frontier research, math and science education, and incentives to graduate more scientists and engineers.
The critical issue going forward is to ensure adequate funding for these programs. Sustaining America's competitive edge requires both commitment and action. But America needs to ask: Is just doing more of the same going to be enough in the 21st century? The U.S. margin of leadership may depend not just on doing more, but on a strategy for doing things differently.
If the competition has successfully imitated the American innovation model, then we should be thinking about the new model that will differentiate U.S. capabilities from the rest of the world.
America must be as innovative in talent as it is in technology. Certainly, it will be critical to lead in the fields that are reshaping the global competitiveness landscape—for example, nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technologies.
But America must also build on core talents and combinations of skills that differentiate and create a margin of advantage at the innovation frontier, including:

•  Educating Renaissance Scientists and Engineers
•  Creating a Cadre of Service Scientists
•  Leveraging Leadership in Computational Technologies

Educating Renaissance Scientists and Engineers

Science and engineering have become part of global enterprise, and for the first time, American scientists and engineers are competing head-to-head with their counterparts in other countries. When faced with robust competition from scientists and engineers from around the world, American scientists and engineers must augment their credentials with other capabilities to sustain a leadership position. Today's science and engineering students need to have a robust knowledge not only of disciplines, but of other combinations of skills as well—effective communications, entrepreneurial initiative, creativity and inventiveness.
To sustain America's margin of leadership, 21st century scientists and engineers need to be innovators with an understanding of business value and an ability to work in multi-cultural environments. They need leadership skills with a flexibility to adapt to changing conditions and a willingness to engage in lifelong learning. This requires a commitment by America's leading educational institutions to a different curriculum in both the sciences and engineering than we have today.

Creating a Cadre of Service Scientists

Although the knowledge-intensive service economy is a principle driver of economic growth, there is a dearth of research, funding, and educational curriculum to accelerate America's capacity for service innovation and productivity.
A recent essay, "The Service Imperative," notes that: Even today relatively few firms have formalized services R&D practices. When Business Week annually reports the list of the World's Most Innovative Companies, few service companies appear on that list. A major academic review article on product innovation reveals little explicit attention to service innovation in the academic literature. According to a 2005 report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: "
The sector has traditionally been seen as less innovative than manufacturing and as playing only a supportive role in the innovation system." ₃₂
Yet, the ability to drive innovation in services is going to be increasingly important to economic competitiveness. Services are in the early stages of "industrialization." The industrial age was enabled by three factors: cheap energy; transportation networks; and standardized parts that enabled mass production. The infrastructure for services is evolving along roughly comparable paths. Computing is the analogue for cheap energy that powers the service industry. The Internet and worldwide communications networks provide a global infrastructure backbone. And standardization is already becoming available in some sectors. In the travel sector, for example, Web sites such as Travelocity or Expedia.com customize travel packages assembled from discrete providers.₃₃
The challenge is that the assembly of complex service systems still remains a trial and error process rather than a predictable discipline. Proponents of a new discipline of service science seek to create a more systematic understanding of how to drive improvements in productivity, quality, compliance, sustainability and innovation in the service economy and to create a cadre of workers to implement that knowledge. Many of today's science and engineering graduates will work in the service economy. They need the knowledge and tools to compete successfully.₃₄

10. The Growing Service Sector Requires a New Combination of Capabilities

Some of the questions this new discipline would address:

•  How to accelerate the rate of innovation in services, business processes and business models by understanding and filling the existing knowledge and tool gaps?
•  How to make innovation and creativity inside the company—entrepreneurship—as relevant to national competitiveness and growth as entrepreneurship? ₃₅
•  How to anticipate customers' demands and understand their real needs? Henry Ford once said: "If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."₃₆
•  How to create an organization in which collective learning becomes a practice, not just a process? ₃₇
•  How to design metrics for effectiveness, not just efficiency? ₃₈
•  How to understand the fundamentals of service sector productivity and develop models to accelerate productivity growth?

The principles of service science remain nascent. But the country that masters this discipline—and produces a cadre of service scientists and engineers who are able to accelerate innovation and productivity in service industries—has a clear advantage in attracting high-value service investments and creating high-value service jobs. The Japanese were the first to master product quality, but so far, no nation has mastered service science, management and engineering.

Leverage Leadership in Computational Technologies

Ongoing research at the Council on Competitiveness is demonstrating that, in the 21st century, "to outcompete is to outcompete." America clearly has the technological edge. The most powerful computing systems in the world are in the United States, but America lacks sufficient numbers of computational scientists to exploit its leadership position. According to Council surveys, the biggest single constraint on the deployment of advanced computation tools is the lack of computational scientists.
At the frontiers of science and engineering, advanced computation has become a major element of the third leg of discovery tools—the other two legs being theory and experimentation. Computer modeling and simulation dramatically accelerate the pace of innovation—and enable new-to-the-world knowledge and insights.
But the business benefits of advanced computing are also becoming clear to the minority of companies that are able to use it. Leading companies are proving out the advantages of leveraging computational capabilities: accelerating design and engineering of new products; reducing time to market through virtual prototyping; and increasing supply chain efficiency and flexibility.
Consider that:

•  In 1980, Boeing tested 77 wings in wind tunnels for the 767. Thanks primarily to high performance computing (HPC) simulation, Boeing needed to physically test only 11 wings for the 787 Dreamliner series, dramatically cutting costs and design time.
•  Entertainment leader DreamWorks Animation SKG would not even exist without powerful computer graphics technology. Every movie is generated on a HPC system.
•  At The Proctor & Gamble Company, computational analysis is used for everything from increasing absorbency in Pampers® diapers to designing the right geometric shape for Pringles® potato chips—one that allows the chip to drop gently into a container rather than flying off the conveyor belt.₃₉
•  Wal-Mart optimizes its entire supply chain on computer models, including daily data analysis to determine what to stock in every store worldwide.₄₀
•  On any given day at the NASDAQ Exchange, more than two billion transactions are processed at rates of more than 200,000 transactions per second. The secret sauce is the ability to use computer modeling to increase volume and transaction speed reliably.₄₁

America's innovation advantage rests not just on having the most advanced tools and technologies in the world, but the people to use them.