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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @08:22PM (1 child)
Really everything will speed back up once someone comes up with an innovative way to generate innovative ideas efficiently.
I can see the algorithm coming together now:
Inputs: Currently unsolved problems, Currently solved problems, Constant feed of new proven technologies
Outputs: Lists of potential innovations with non starters weeded out
Then we just need teams of QC'ers to evaluate the outputs for viability.
See? There's nothing that can't be automated! Of course, garbage in makes garbage out though.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @09:45PM
You can get your bot to write this garbage and I'll get my bot to filter it. While we get busy working on how to defeat eachother's bots. Sounds awesome!