It's no longer the American century. After giving the world the airplane, mass production, the transistor, the computer, the laser, and the Internet, the United States can feel proud. But as pundits love to remind us, we live in a global economy. It is becoming ever clearer that innovation is not the exclusive domain of the U.S. Indeed, it never really was: we can thank the British for the steam engine, the Japanese for just-in-time manufacturing and cheap, portable electronics, and the Germans for the earliest internal-combustion cars. And given current trends, it's increasingly hard to believe that the U.S. still dominates the development of intellectual property. As our "Global Perspectives" package (p. 42) shows, different countries are taking up the technological quest with a passion dictated by their own particular needs—and the resulting technologies, while addressing those needs, could have far-reaching applications in the wider world as well.

Just as each individual state in the U.S. is, in Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis's famous formulation, a laboratory of ­democracy, so in the global community a growing number of countries have become test beds for technological innovation—prioritizing work that helps solve problems and make life better in their particular societies. Chile, for instance, is using biotechnology to breathe new life into its core industries: copper mining and salmon farming. South Africa faces unusual challenges in getting a largely poor population that speaks 11 official languages to use information technology. No wonder the country's top R&D lab is concentrating so much on systems that add language capabilities to computers. The Netherlands, which engineered itself into existence by reclaiming its geography from the North Sea, is becoming a developer of environmental technologies.