Toward a Global RAND

By James A. Thomson

James A. Thomson is president and chief executive officer of the RAND Corporation.

PHOTO BY DIANE BALDWIN

When I became RAND’s president in 1989, the Cold War was winding down. RAND had been born and come of age during that turbulent era, the end of which required us to embrace waves of change. None was more important than our effort to transform RAND into an international policy research organization, a process that continues today.

At its inception, RAND focused on U.S. national security problems. Our research staff was almost exclusively U.S. citizens, and most problems that they analyzed were ones faced by America. But as the Cold War subsided, new opportunities arose for RAND to address a broader array of security and nonsecurity policy challenges for an international clientele, using U.S. and non-U.S. researchers alike.

Three strong reasons buttressed our decision to become an international organization, reasons that remain valid today.

First, our mission is to help improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. Because many policy problems outside the United States intersect with those inside the United States, we have been able to leverage our traditional expertise for non-U.S. clients. At the same time, by applying our skills to seemingly familiar problems in different political and cultural settings, we have been able to enrich the analytic capabilities of our staff, enhancing the quality of our products for all clients.

Second, internationalization allows us to tap new reservoirs of talent that reflect multiple cultures, nationalities, languages, perspectives, and histories. By hiring staff from global pools, we raise the quality of our research and gain significant competitive advantages. Today, the RAND staff comprises more than 50 nationalities, and the Pardee RAND Graduate School draws a third of its roughly 100 doctorate fellows from outside the United States.

Third, international work strengthens us financially by allowing us to diversify our expertise in an expanding global marketplace for policy analysis.

Today, RAND has clients in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and North America. About 10 percent of our revenue comes from overseas, a portion that we envision will grow. RAND Europe has about 70 staff members in Cambridge and Brussels, serving clients in the United Kingdom, other European countries, and the European Commission. The RAND-Qatar Policy Institute, founded in 2003, has 16 employees serving clients in Qatar and elsewhere in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Recently, we opened a representative office in Mexico City and established a presence in Australia.

Over the years, skeptics have wondered whether RAND research can work around the world. Underlying the research is an abiding belief that scientific rigor can be applied successfully to the world of policy, and some have doubted how well this approach can travel beyond U.S. borders. But our experience since 1989 has proven the skeptics wrong: Our work for international clients is growing, our international offices are thriving, and we plan to open more offices overseas. All of these efforts have merely broadened the scope of our original charter, which calls upon us to work in the public interest. With our multiple engagements around the world, it is clear that the public interest to which RAND is beholden no longer stops at the water’s edge.