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: 3, Informative) by tibman on Tuesday June 06 2017, @11:59PM
Etsy [etsy.com], Kickstarter [kickstarter.com], indiegogo [tindie.com], tindie [tindie.com]
Create an account and sell whatever you make. This is the bootstrap for your new company.
Maybe you have an idea and don't know how to fabricate? Here is where your first prototype can come from: https://www.ponoko.com/ [ponoko.com] or https://www.shapeways.com/ [shapeways.com]
It's never been easier to create and sell products to people around the world. Seriously.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.