The conflicting signals coming out of the U.S.-China tech competition are becoming increasingly difficult to interpret. Headlines claim that China is generating more high-impact generative AI research, but models from U.S. companies hold the vast majority of the global market share.
China continues to advance toward domestically-produced semiconductor chips, yet at the beginning of February, Taiwan surpassed China in the weighting of the key emerging market stock index driven by the growth of its U.S.-linked chip industry.
"In this fog of conflicting metrics, how do policymakers figure out which moves actually matter?"
In 1972, Congress authorized the now-defunct Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) to answer that very question by providing insight into the technological competitions of the late 20th century. Today, the U.S.-China rivalry necessitates a revitalization of this practice.
Existing government and private efforts on this front are falling short, struggling with either being one-sided or overly stovepiped. U.S. Intelligence Community analysis is only able to focus on China's capabilities, lacking the mandate to offer the perspective on how the United States fits into the picture. Many measures and indices offered by research organizations focus only on one piece of the puzzle, such as investment or research, without taking the holistic view needed to understand the full competitive landscape.
A Methodology for Comprehensiveness and Nuance
In this void, SCSP has developed the SCSP Tech Scorecard, a novel framework designed to comprehensively measure a country's advantages and disadvantages across critical technology sectors. The SCSP Tech Scorecard builds on and refines our previous “Gaps Analysis” of technology leadership.
Throughout the year, SCSP will be using the SCSP Tech Scorecard to evaluate who's ahead and who's behind in various critical technology areas that will be determinants of national power in the years to come. To move beyond narrow binary comparisons, the SCSP Tech Scorecard evaluates national competitiveness through a framework composed of five distinct categories:
Each of these categories represents a dimension of technological power needed to hold a positional advantage in any given technology. These categories ensure a holistic perspective of each technology analyzed while allowing the specific metrics that are measured to be tailored to the technology in question, taking into account its stage of development and specific material requirements.
The SCSP Tech Scorecard applies a structured analytic approach to compile, weigh, and score both quantitative and qualitative metrics, offering an objective and clear view of the state of each critical technology and how national advantages are built, sustained, or lost over time.
By enabling more informed assessments of strengths, vulnerabilities, and long-term trends, the Tech Scorecard equips policymakers and decision-makers with a critical advantage to shape strategies that strengthen U.S. competitiveness. As technological competition increasingly drives economic and strategic outcomes, comprehensive, comparative insight is no longer optional; it is essential.