Today’s Financial Times reports (for subscribers only) that SpongeBob SquarePants will soon launch in Japan and China. No surprise there, but the scale of SpongeBob’s success certainly struck me: “The character has generated $4bn so far in retail sales alone, and its consumer products revenues are growing at about 25 per cent a year in the 22 international markets in which the line has launched.”

Having launched in 1999, SpongeBob is a year younger than Google. $4 billion and 22 markets is an amazing record in that time.

In the circles I run around in, there’s a lot of head-scratching these days on how the US and other advanced economies will remain innovative and competitive with the rise of India and China. I remain pretty bullish about the prospects for the economy as a whole (employment and wealth distribution may be another issue), because I think it will take a very long time for developing countries to replicate – to say nothing of replace – the innovation ecology that produces a SpongeBob or a Google.

You can read an extreme statement of my kind of optimism in Tom Peters. Take away his exclamation points, and I agree with much of what he writes. The contrast is the doom-mongering from Tom Friedman.

That said, the US certainly seems to take a cavalier attitude to its great, innovation-producing strength. Living in Berkeley, I’m acutely aware of the pressures on the amazing government-funded educational and research institutions like the University of California. Add into the mix the Bush administration’s disdain for science and there’s the potential for the US to fall a long way eventually. Fortunately, unlike the development of a Google or a SpongeBob, these kinds of shift take a very long time to work through the system. There’s still time to recover from the mistakes being made today.