The world economy has entered a new era of industrial competition. Every major advanced industrial nation—and a growing number of developing ones—are all competing in the same crucial technologies. A 1989 “Critical Technologies Plan” published by the Department of Defense identified 22 technologies essential to future military security, but the technologies are also indicators of commercial strength. On the list: microelectronic circuits and their fabrication, gallium arsenide and other semiconductor compounds, software, parallel computer architectures, machine intelligence and robotics, computer simulation and modeling, integrated optics, and fiber optics.
A version of this article appeared in the January–February 1991 issue of Harvard Business Review.
