The other day, I met a man with wild, graying hair, who, with his wife, founded Earthstone, a "green" company in New Mexico that pulverizes recycled glass and turns it into a powder that is mixed with other materials to make a soft-stone scrubber to clean patio grills.

Andrew Ungerleider and Gay Dillingham tell me they are raising funds to use the same technology to produce a superlight concrete and other building matériel.

In a more benign economic era, Earthstone would raise mostly private money (sweetened with government grants and tax breaks) and would slowly scale up its new technology.

But in these troubled times, investment to rapidly scale up such new ideas is difficult, if not impossible to raise—which could mean no superlight concrete, no cutting-edge technology, no spending by Earthstone on supplies and materials, and no new jobs.

Across the United States—and around the world—cutting-edge technologies are poised just like Earthstone's to make everything from automobile and jet fuel out of algae to synthetic organisms that eat CO₂ emissions. Yet most are unable to raise the money needed to test their new ideas.

As President-elect Barack Obama makes plans to use massive government spending to pull us out of our economic slump, it's important that he take action to not only drive a recovery in the short term, but also to propel America again to the forefront of innovation in this new century.

Two clues: It's not just bridges and infrastructure, and it's not thinking small.

Rather, it's science and technology.

Since our ancestors first walked upright, human ingenuity has produced many wonders (and a few horrors). But more often than not, dramatic new ideas have given the edge to the clans, tribes, nations, and civilizations that embrace them. Those who failed to adopt the latest developments, whether it was the invention of the wheel or the microchip, tended to decline or to be left behind.

This is why Obama needs to move quickly to implement a bold technology push on the scale of President John F. Kennedy's call nearly a half-century ago to put a man on the moon. Such an effort would employ not just the tech elite, but workers at all levels of education and training.

It needs to go beyond his campaign promises to double the budgets over the next 10 years of the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and other federal research-and-development agencies.

It would also have to go beyond the $150 billion Obama's promised to develop clean-fuel technologies and to create five million "green-collar" jobs—and beyond the vague talk about including technological innovation as part of the stimulus package being prepared by the new administration and by members of Congress.