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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 kaszz on Wednesday June 07 2017, @02:01AM
Low hanging fruits are taken first. That is kind of natural. But there are things that can be done to improve the situation:
* Stable funding without complicating paper filing.
* Banning of bureaucrats and death by MBA people.
* Mitigate barrier to entry through regulatory compliance help.
* Don't have a fix focus blinder on people with formal academical exams.
More "blue sky" projects. Clean the school of training towards standardized tests instead of independent thinking and creativity. Use real world examples to test and exemplify the utility of knowledge. And definitely remove incomprehensible, irrelevant, un-tested, rote learning, uniformity and fixed learning style education. Many tests require expensive computers and internet connection that suck money from already constrained school budgets. Removing teacher time will not improve results.. And of course fix any hostile social or physical work climate for students.
Things can be done. But it's a question of political will or god/bad actor. More efficient is probably taking initiative by oneself to get things done.