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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 ??
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 06 2017, @08:05PM (1 child)
Whiner, all you need to start a small business is a few people who are independently wealthy - not needing income for however long it takes to get the business going, and sufficient investment capital to do the startup activities. Increase your investment capital and you can even afford to pay some of the startup employees. This is really no different than it has been for the last 100 years. Banks will loan you money to get started, if you can convince them your business plan / collateral doesn't exceed their risk appetite.
What's different is that you can't just "open a shop" somewhere in town and expect people to support you. There's not much left in the realm of "unmet needs." Food, clothing, and shelter are already provided very efficiently by existing businesses. Markets with high profit margins have also constructed high barriers to entry.
If you know your market, whether it is local, regional or global, and you can successfully address an unmet need, then you, too can successfully launch a small business. Just like it has been for time immemorial, business startups misjudge the market or undercapitalize on startup and fail. If you want a "sure thing" find a corner with just one drugstore on it, sit in the parking lot and count the customers going into that store, if they have enough traffic you can open a competing store across the street, steal half their customers, and both stores can be profitable. The costs and returns on investment are well established, and banks will finance these kinds of propositions easily. Hardly innovative, but it is done all the time.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:45PM
The trick is to find a need that is not being met very well and do it better.