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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday June 06 2017, @04:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the we'll-brainstorm-this dept.

Modern-day inventors—even those in the league of Steve Jobs—will have a tough time measuring up to the productivity of the Thomas Edisons of the past.
That's because big ideas are getting harder and harder to find, and innovations have become increasingly massive and costly endeavors, according to new research from economists at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. As a result, tremendous continual increases in research and development will be needed to sustain even today's low rate of economic growth.

Nicholas Bloom, a SIEPR senior fellow and co-author of the forthcoming paper, contends that so many game-changing inventions have appeared since World War II that it's become increasingly difficult to come up with the next big idea.

[...] Turning its focus to publicly traded companies, the study found a fraction of firms where research productivity—as measured by growth in sales, market capitalization, employment and revenue-per-worker productivity—grew decade-over-decade since 1980. But overall, more than 85 percent of the firms showed steady, rapid declines in productivity while their spending in R&D rose. The analysis found research productivity for firms fell, on average, about 10 percent per year, and it would take 15 times more researchers today than it did 30 years ago to produce the same rate of economic growth.

https://phys.org/news/2017-06-big-ideas-harder.html

[Source]: https://siepr.stanford.edu/news/productivity-ideas-hard-to-find
[Paper]: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

Do you think that innovative ideas are hard to find ??


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 06 2017, @06:43PM (5 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday June 06 2017, @06:43PM (#521484)

    Oh, come on, Edison slaved in his workshop for years finding thousands of ways _not_ to make a lightbulb. Then he accumulated over 1000 US patents before he died. Surely the 1092 non-lightbulb patents were all direct fruits of his inventive thought, his personal experimental toiling, blood, sweat and tears. The tour guide at the Edison home in Fort Myers said as much to my 2nd grade class, right under the Banyan tree given to him by Mr. Goodyear, it must be true.

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  • (Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday June 06 2017, @08:10PM (4 children)

    by Bot (3902) on Tuesday June 06 2017, @08:10PM (#521542) Journal

    Edison bought the method to obtain vacuum for better lightbulbs from our fellow Malignani in 1896. The same fellow patented an all-electric car capable of 18km/h and 60km autonomy in 1891.

    But I wrote to say that it's full of big ideas, mostly by lone inventors, mostly ending up in a drawer, because the incumbents do not need them.
    See the E-cat story as an example. No matter if it works or not, the fact that a supremely strategic idea like that is yet to be deemed valid or bogus is sign of lack of interest. Did not some Swedish patent meddle with cold fusion too, in the 1950s?

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    • (Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 06 2017, @08:43PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Tuesday June 06 2017, @08:43PM (#521561)

      I forget who "invented" it, but there's an old patent on a solar energy plant that works by covering acres with a funnel shaped greenhouse and running a turbine in the updraft of heated air. Hugely expensive to build, a little creative maybe, but nobody cared at the time so it didn't go anywhere. Then the inventor is all cheesed 30 years later when somebody actually built one in Australia and didn't pay him for his expired patent... sorry Bud, bad timing, you published too soon to get paid.

      Then there are many examples of industry simply ignoring currently valuable patented IP until the inventor gives up on protecting it - hydraulic assist power steering is a clear case of that, there are hundreds more.

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    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:09PM (2 children)

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:09PM (#521875) Journal

      See the E-cat story as an example. No matter if it works or not, the fact that a supremely strategic idea like that is yet to be deemed valid or bogus is sign of lack of interest.

      Or rather simply hard to test, due in large part to the suspicious secretiveness of the inventor. I think rather the inability to confirm it at this late date is a strong indication of the bogusness of the E-cat claims.

      • (Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:06PM (1 child)

        by Bot (3902) on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:06PM (#522005) Journal

        I was not clear enough. Let's say that guy builds a new kind of atomic bomb. Before he has even finished designing it, the armi and the secret services are already storming his lab.
        - "Hey stop I have to patent it!!"
        - "National security, lad, we get this and you get to work for us with a nice pay, blackjack and hookers or a fatal road accident, you choose".

        Except that the Ecat is even more disruptive to the system than the new kind of atomic bomb. My only rationalization for this is that a lot of stuff has already been discovered and will be released when it yields the maximum of profit/karma/advantage. In the meantime our money is spent on manned aircrafts defending oil fields.

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        • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 08 2017, @02:53AM

          by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 08 2017, @02:53AM (#522406) Journal
          Nobody stormed anyone's labs. Ecat is disruptive only if it is a real phenomenon of sufficient productiveness to matter. Current evidence indicates it isn't.