quote: "A comprehensive study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the number of researchers needed to develop new drugs, improved crop yields, and better microprocessors has risen substantially over the past 50 years. Other studies have found that research and development (R&D) productivity has fallen across a wide variety of industries, with lower growth in corporate revenues per research dollar than in the past, and that the impact of Nobel Prize–winning research has also declined. From a given amount of effort (or dollars), less knowledge and innovation arise. Our optimism about the economic prospects of new technologies and innovation should be going down, not up."
Is this, perhaps, also a product of system complexity? maturity and limits of certain processes? guidance and management seeking goals that are de-coupled from reality?
Declining VC investments in, what I read as, CORE TECH. We are so busy funding some website social convenience service that we forgot about the chips powering it, the power powering it, etc. and rapidly hit EOL on processes.
Perhaps real innovation requires
1) actual major efforts, efforts that our economic system doesn't prioritize enough. there's a million monkeys happy to use your platform for trivial mc-innovations, but you have to slog it out and build said platform first.
2) a deliberate plan, path, trajectory. (I hate to use the manhattan project as a good example for anything, perhaps Arpanet is a little less ugly of an example, in terms of impact.)
Favorite Quote: "The strategic management discipline places far more emphasis on capturing value through managing revenue streams (e.g., advertising versus subscriptions or product sales) and the scope of activities (e.g., the degree of vertical integration) than on creating value through high-performing, low-cost products that improve productivity in industries. Currently the most popular method of capturing value is with so-called platforms that organize an industry around a single product or service (think of Airbnb, for example, which offers a platform by which homeowners can rent out rooms), often enabling the platform provider to capture most of an industry’s profits. Not only is value creation clearly more important for increasing productivity than is value capture, it is not a coincidence that most of the current money-losing start-ups (e.g., Uber and Lyft) emphasize platforms in their announcements and IPO filings, building from the hype that business schools created."
Which of course leads to me saying: "there's very little incentive to build a platform that's useful for other actors. there's very little incentive to respect and treat users like humans"