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Yesterday I blogged about David J. Rothkopf’s attack on “the widely subscribed to notion  . . . often cited by politicians and op-ed writers . . . that somehow there is something special, some gene in American DNA, that makes us uniquely capable when it comes to innovation.” Rothkopf argued that “the United States’ only path to renewed growth and sustained leadership is via innovation and enhanced competitiveness. But we have no natural right to lead in those areas. We have no special ‘gene.’”

Be that as it may, here’s the good news: A new study by General Electric, the “GE Global Innovation Barometer,” finds that most executives worldwide still consider the United States the clear leader in innovation. The survey was based on telephone interviews with 1,000 executives in 12 countries, all of them involved with innovation at the level of vice president or above. It found that when those executives were asked to name the three most innovative nations, 67% of them mentioned the U.S.; Germany followed at 44%, Japan at 43%, and China at 35%. And almost all of them felt that this matters greatly: 95% said they believe that innovativeness is the “main lever” for economic competitiveness.

So whether or not we’ve got a gene for it, the world believes we are still the very best at innovating.

Read more from GE about the study here, and a Fast Company article about it here.

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Pope Benedict XVI, during his weekly general audience, said today that politicians would do well to follow the example of Joan of Arc, the fifteenth-century martyr who began hearing voices when she was 13, followed God’s instructions to lead France’s army against England, and ended up burned at the stake for witchcraft and heresy. She was canonized in 1920 by Pope Benedict XV. “Hers is a beautiful example of holiness for laypeople involved in politics,” the Holy Father said, “especially in difficult situations. Faith is the light that guided all her choices.” You can read more of the Pope’s stirring and thought-provoking words in an article from the Catholic News Service here.

Mark Zuckerberg: A true American innovator, no? Image by Getty Images North America via @daylife

President Obama made innovation a central focus of his State of the Union address last night. Meanwhile David J. Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of books including Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, has a provocative article online at Foreign Policy in which he blasts “the widely subscribed to notion  . . . often cited by politicians and op-ed writers . . . that somehow there is something special, some gene in American DNA, that makes us uniquely capable when it comes to innovation.” Hooey, he says. Look at the telephone, based partly on the work of Europeans and brought to fruition by a Scottish immigrant who died in Canada. Or the automobile, invented in Europe before Henry Ford made it mass-market. Or the camera, developed in Europe before George Eastman came up with the Kodak. And on and on.

In most of the cases Rothkopf cites, the American breakthrough was to fully commercialize a nascent technology, as when U.S. businesses took Philo Farnsworth’s “incremental gain” in television technology and built a new medium and industry on it. “The trick with innovation,” he writes, “is not just having the idea, it’s bringing it to market. This in turn means bringing it to scale. Well, for much of the past century the natural place to do both was the U.S. because of our manufacturing prowess and because we were the world’s biggest market. Well, guess what? Manufacturing is now less than 20 percent of the U.S. economy and falling fast.”

He concludes that “The United States’ only path to renewed growth and sustained leadership is via innovation and enhanced competitiveness. But we have no natural right to lead in those areas. We have no special ‘gene.’”

Surely if Americans have over and over again taken seeds planted elsewhere and brought them to full, luxuriant fruition, that is a formidable accomplishment. And it is no small matter when, in just the last few years, Steve Jobs takes existing MP3 and mobile phone and tablet computer technology and pulls the iPod and iPhone and  iPad out of his hat, or when Mark Zuckerberg takes capability already inherent in the European-born World Wide Web and conjures up Facebook—while still in college. Those two examples alone suggest that at least some Americans have hardly lost the gift for seeing beyond everyone else, if it is indeed a gift that the nature of our society has somehow given to us. But we most certainly, as Rothkopf says, cannot afford to take it for granted.

Read Rothkopf’s full article here.

Jeffrey Immelt of GE. Image by AFP via @daylife

What businesses most expect their employees to lead, and best prepare their employees to lead? It’s very, very hard to say, of course, but the management consultancy Hay Group tries. It just released its ranking of the world’s 20 “best companies for leadership.” The champion: General Electric.

Hay Group polled 3,769 individuals and 1,827 organizations worldwide, first asking employees to rate their own organizations’ leadership practices and then asking them to nominate three other companies they admired most for leadership. The idea is that this should produce a list of businesses that are highly respected both within their walls and well beyond. The survey also asked questions about the companies, whose answers resulted in the following findings, among others: Among the top 20, 100% “give everyone, at every level, the chance to develop and practice leadership,” as opposed to 69.2% of all companies in the study, and also 100% “encourage local leaders to participate in HQ decisions, compared to 71.8% of global peer firms.”

Here are the top 20:

1. General Electric
2. Procter & Gamble
3. Intel
4. Siemens
5. Banco Santander
6. Coca-Cola
7. McDonald’s
8. Accenture
9. Wal-Mart
10. Southwest Airlines
11. ABB
12. Microsoft
13. PepsiCo
14. Goldman Sachs
15. Hewlett-Packard
16. Unilever
17. Cisco Systems
18. FedEx
19. Pfizer
20. BASF

Does this mean that by picking GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt to run his White House panel on jobs and competitiveness, President Obama has picked the best leader of leaders there is?

For more on the study, click here.

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Last night “The American Experience” on PBS broadcast a magnificent documentary on the making of the Panama Canal. You can—and should—see it online here. It’s an amazing, inspiring true tale of what the U.S. is capable of when it puts all its might behind a great creative endeavor–or, more specifically, what the U.S. could do even a century ago, when it was much smaller and less powerful than today.

The French had spent many years and thousands of lives trying to build a canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and had been defeated by year-round heavy rains in mountainous mud, deadly diseases, and impossible expenses. The U.S. then stepped in and eventually made the effort into something like a huge, long military campaign. It involved moving mountains and eradicating disease and inventing and constructing by far the hugest locks and lock gates ever conceived at the time and even a 1914 General Electric computer system to run it all. The canal’s completion helped to confirm America’s rising industrial and creative dominance in the world of the twentieth century.

I have the honor of being a talking head on the show, having written about the canal when I was the managing editor of American Heritage magazine and the editor of American Heritage of Invention & Technology. But I had nothing to do with the making of the movie and didn’t even see it before last night. It is the superb work of the filmmaker Stephen Ives, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly. See it here.