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, @08:29PM (1 child)
I thought the full-duplex radio [technologyreview.com] that came out of Stanford was pretty cool. E-ink still impresses me as something electronic that makes you think it isn't. There is also that low-tech mini-centrifuge [nature.com] that reaches 125,000 rpm. White LEDs for interior lighting are impressive. But the article is probably right. Lone inventors are more likely to be patent-trolls now than contributors to progress, and the set of inventible things may be getting exhausted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 06 2017, @09:48PM
That's some cool shit bro. I also heard M&Ms is innovating a new color.