For decades, the United States ruled the world when it came to the issue of innovation. New technologies in virtually every profession were thought up in the U.S. and developed there. The rest of the world could only watch how the U.S. was advancing and improving itself in every field.

In 2008, however, that has changed dramatically. The U.S. is still an innovative country, but China and other countries have started to innovate as well. Suddenly, the U.S. is not merely exporting innovation, it’s importing it.

This while innovation will be the export product of the future; the more the world relies on technology, the more important innovation is.

The International Herald Tribune decided to take a closer lookat Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s view on innovation, and their plan to bring America back to the top. Their findings:

Their visions are strikingly different. They diverge mainly on the appropriate role for the federal government in education, in spending on research, and in building, maintaining and regulating the complex infrastructure on which innovation depends. The visions both face tough questions on their viability amid the nation’s deepening financial crisis.

Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, seeks to encourage innovation by cutting corporate taxes and ending what he calls “burdensome regulations” that he says inhibit corporate investment. But McCain has also repeatedly gone up against business if he sees a conflict with national security, for instance, in seeking to limit sensitive exports.

In Senator Barack Obama’s view, the United States must compete far more effectively against an array of international rivals who are growing more technically adept. Obama, the Democratic nominee, looks to the federal government to finance science, math and engineering education and the kind of basic research that can produce valuable industrial spinoffs…

It remains to be seen how the candidates would pay for their proposals.

At the request of The New York Times, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, estimated the annual costs of the plans and put Obama’s at $85.6 billion and McCain’s at $78.8 billion, excluding his proposed reductions in corporate taxes.

On McCain:

Domestically over the years, McCain’s committee sought to spur things like Internet development, the private space industry and the commercial licensing of federally owned inventions.

But in 2002, for the first time, the nation registered negative balances of trade in advanced technology goods for a whole year. “Time to wake up,” Representative Donald Manzullo, an Illinois Republican, said as he led a hearing in July 2003 on preserving the defense industrial base.

McCain, who held no hearings on the issues, did push for new innovations. For instance, he introduced a bill in 2005 to limit heat-trapping gases that sought to spur the development of green technologies.

Obama:

America, Obama wrote, cannot compete with countries like China and India simply by cutting costs and shrinking government. “If we want an innovation economy,” he added, “one that generates more Googles each year, then we have to invest in our future innovators — by doubling federal funding of basic research over the next five years, training 100,000 more engineers and scientists over the next four years, or providing new research grants to the most outstanding early-career researchers in the country.”…

He acknowledged that his plan would cost about $42 billion over five years — “real money, to be sure, but just 15 percent of the most recent federal highway bill.”

The next year, Obama joined other senators to introduce a bill that built on the recommendations of “The Gathering Storm.” It eventually drew 69 co-sponsors from both sides of the Senate aisle; McCain was not among them.

Obama then offered amendments to the bill intended to increase federal support of science education, particularly among women and underrepresented minorities. “If we do not tap the diversity of our nation,” he said on the Senate floor, “we will diminish our capacity to innovate.”

Compare and contrast:

Though their approaches differ, both call for changes in the operation of the patent office, agree that access to broadband must be expanded and advocate steps to encourage technically trained foreigners to enter and stay in the United States.

But Obama looks to encourage basic research with infusions of federal cash. McCain says easing regulatory and tax burdens will encourage private spending on research. (Experts say industry now tends to focus on near-term applications, while government finances more basic research that has greater breakthrough potential.)…

Experts agree that the immediacy of the financial crisis is overshadowing the innovation debate and predict little headway until a new president has settled into office and confronts budgetary realities.

“The problem,” said Boehlert, the former chairman of the House science committee, who left Congress last year, “is that it takes an immediate investment that won’t pay immediate dividends, and people are looking for an instant fix.”