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