With the United States mired in a painfully slow recovery from the Great
Recession, some economists project that years of tepid growth may lie ahead.
But this view does not fully account for the resilience and innovative capacity of
the US economy. In this report we identify “game changers”—catalysts that can
spur productivity, boost GDP by hundreds of billions of dollars, and generate
significant numbers of jobs by 2020.
After evaluating a larger universe of ideas, we arrived at a set of five opportunities
that could accelerate growth: shale gas and oil production; increased trade
competitiveness in knowledge-intensive manufactured goods; the potential of big
data analytics to raise productivity; increased investment in infrastructure, with a
new emphasis on its productivity; and a more cohesive and effective system of
talent development in both K–12 and post-secondary education.