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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: 1) by khallow on Wednesday June 07 2017, @01:09PM (2 children)
Or rather simply hard to test, due in large part to the suspicious secretiveness of the inventor. I think rather the inability to confirm it at this late date is a strong indication of the bogusness of the E-cat claims.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday June 07 2017, @04:06PM (1 child)
I was not clear enough. Let's say that guy builds a new kind of atomic bomb. Before he has even finished designing it, the armi and the secret services are already storming his lab.
- "Hey stop I have to patent it!!"
- "National security, lad, we get this and you get to work for us with a nice pay, blackjack and hookers or a fatal road accident, you choose".
Except that the Ecat is even more disruptive to the system than the new kind of atomic bomb. My only rationalization for this is that a lot of stuff has already been discovered and will be released when it yields the maximum of profit/karma/advantage. In the meantime our money is spent on manned aircrafts defending oil fields.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 08 2017, @02:53AM