Hunt for Cash Sends Colleges Overseas

When you think of research and development powerhouses, chances are Portugal misses your list.

U.S. colleges are tapping foreign countries for research funding.

(ABC News Photo Illustration)

Yet in the past two years, the tiny seaside nation tapped government coffers to finance one of the most ambitious international research and development partnerships in the history of American higher education.

In 2006, they kicked off a project providing Portugal a portfolio of post-graduate courses and potentially high-reward R&D investments in energy systems at MIT, information technology at Carnegie Mellon and advanced computing at the University of Texas-Austin. Next stop: Harvard Medical School, which will operate an R&D program in medical sciences on behalf of Portugal.

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The country's not alone. The global race for economic and strategic influence through scientific supremacy is accelerating as nations from Finland to the United Arab Emirates and South Africa to Malaysia to Germany brace for the technical and commercial challenges that every economy will face in the coming decades. And many of America's leading academic institutions are finding a ready market for what they do best--though it's increasingly from foreign governments.

"This is about competitiveness," Dr. Lewis Edelheit, General Electric's former senior vice president of corporate research, said at a National Academy of Sciences conference about science and technology policy last winter. "Some countries are tying to figure out how to get it, others how to keep it and still others how to get it back. And it's all about learning how to move fast and win in a brutally competitive global economy such as we've never seen."

In the past decade or so, nearly a dozen deep-pocketed national R&D agendas have emerged around the world, accelerating the pace of innovation in fields from solar energy to DNA synthesis. In 2006, the world's industrialized economies invested more than $817 billion on R&D, nearly twice the amount spent in 1996 in real terms, according to the OECD's Science and Technology Outlook 2008. Despite this impressive increase, R&D spending has been pushed primarily by emerging economies in Asia and the Middle East.