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Comment by Eridrus | Hacker News Reader

Why does the argument that "the government should spend more on basic R&D" need to be packaged with "no-one outside of academica ever does anything innovative"?

Most people in tech wholeheartedly agree with the former and disagree with the latter.

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Not what I said. I realize that it's asking a lot to click through to the underlying links (said without irony, since I rarely do that myself anymore :), but I'm talking just as much about the massive network of labs that was funded by tax dollars in the cold war, only a portion of which were in universities.

I was in academia for years. I didn't see all that much innovation coming out of there, either. Too much politics and rent-seeking (gotta get that next grant) and you have to publish, and there's committees and conferences. And then whenever we did invent something cool, the university patent office wouldn't take it and do anything with it! I should have 2-3 patents now and instead I have none. Not that I'm a fan of patents, anyways, but it was the late 90s and my adviser and I were breaking new ground at the time.

You don't need to be in academia, but you do need to create a working environment that shares some of the same features. Very few companies do this well; most don't do it at all. Which isn't to say it's impossible to innovate in industry - but typically it is actively made much more difficult.

It's undoubtedly true that "innovation" is a term that is much abused in industry, weakened to the point it is mostly meaningless.

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