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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 TheLink on Wednesday June 07 2017, @09:58AM
There are plenty of ideas. Big and small.
The issue is when you don't have the right people or system to efficiently and effectively identify, curate and implement the good ones.
Take the Manhattan project ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project#Origins [wikipedia.org] ). It started with people with power who knew _enough_ and they managed to get some geniuses (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer [wikipedia.org] ) who could identify suitable ultra-geniuses ( e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Cognitive_abilities [wikipedia.org] ) and bring them in AND get them to perform well together:
Compare with the German program: http://www.atomicheritage.org/history/german-atomic-bomb-project [atomicheritage.org]
Many knew about splitting the atom and the potential for creating nuclear weapons. The idea was there but it's not so simple to implement it.
But of course it's easier to do it AND more importantly get the _will_ to do it once someone else has proven it's possible AND worth it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_project [wikipedia.org]
Of course sometimes you get lots of will and resources to do stuff wrong. Like trying to do missions to Mars _first_ before even doing the necessary _science_ to see if humans and our favorite animals can do well enough in Mars gravity with stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Module [wikipedia.org]