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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 Thexalon on Wednesday June 07 2017, @02:35AM
If you want to generate ideas, you can sit down with some sort of writing device and come up with all sorts of ideas. It's not hard. What's hard is (A) knowing enough to know what ideas are good, and (B) following through on turning those ideas into reality.
If you need further proof, talk to about half the people trying to hire freelance developers, who think that they've got a great revolutionary idea that will completely disrupt some market, and all they need is somebody who can throw together the website quick and easy-like, for either equity or something like $500 (which is of course ridiculously underpriced for the level of complexity of what they're asking for). More often than not, the revolutionary idea is something along the lines of "$FAMOUS_WEBSITE, but with some newfangled gizmo that $FAMOUS_WEBSITE either doesn't have for a very good reason, or will have in a couple of months because it's fairly obvious."
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.