American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation?
nytimes.com
American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation?
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Re: American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation?
#2This whole article is assuming that innovation comes from money, and specifically from the money labeled "R&D" in the budgets of nations and companies.
Yet, most startups started on shoestrings. Then they got investment from VC firms. These sources of innovation don't come from NSF or Microsoft Research.
And American innovation comes from far more than money. The culture of American innovation is a huge factor, which isn't declining at all.
Re: American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation?
#3The iPhone in your pocket has more computing power than the Voyager spacecraft that left the solar system two years ago
Sigh..people who use this example don't understand engineering. The Voyager doesn't need much power to do its job. An iPhone needs a lot of power to surf the web and play videos. An iphone also has more computing power than a Casio watch that you can buy a Walmart, because the watch doesn't need much power to merely display the time. It also has more computing power than a traffic light.
As for R&D, another possibility is that universities and small companies may be compensating for R&D stagnation in bigger companies. Many bigger companies acquire small innovative firms instead of doing the research all themselves.
Re: American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation?
#4The iPhone in your pocket has more computing power than the Voyager spacecraft that left the solar system two years ago Sigh..people who use this example don't understand engineering. The Voyager doesn't need much power to do its job. An iPhone needs a lot of power to surf the web and play videos. An iphone also has more computing power than a Casio watch that you can buy a Walmart, because the watch doesn't need muc…
Your last point is addressed at the end of the article:
> Rather than invest in their own science, big companies may now more easily buy innovative start-ups and develop their most promising discoveries into profitable technology.
> And yet this ecosystem is vulnerable, reliant on a dwindling pot of public money that underwrites most university-based research.
> “The buy-up strategy would be fine if we had confidence that the university system and start-ups were picking up the slack,” Professor Arora told me. “But we still don’t understand how this division of innovative labor would work.”
> It might work. But it looks risky to put all our trust in that approach. It’s time for a different paradigm — more on that in a future column — to finance the innovation that will power America’s future.
Re: American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation?
#5This whole article is assuming that innovation comes from money, and specifically from the money labeled "R&D" in the budgets of nations and companies. Yet, most startups started on shoestrings. Then they got investment from VC firms. These sources of innovation don't come from NSF or Microsoft Research. And American innovation comes from far more than money. The culture of American innovation is a huge factor, which…
Trashing the margins of existing industries or providing a new interface for web-based technologies that have been around in one form or another since the early 90s is hardly innovation. You were saying something about startups?
Re: American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation?
#6Here's an article on a related topic, Beyond the Internet, Innovation Struggles: http://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-the-internet-innovation-s...
Mirror, if you can't get past the paywall: https://www.notehub.org/2015/8/20/beyond-the-internet-innova...
Re: American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation?
#7The iPhone in your pocket has more computing power than the Voyager spacecraft that left the solar system two years ago Sigh..people who use this example don't understand engineering. The Voyager doesn't need much power to do its job. An iPhone needs a lot of power to surf the web and play videos. An iphone also has more computing power than a Casio watch that you can buy a Walmart, because the watch doesn't need muc…
"An iphone also has more computing power than a Casio watch that you can buy a Walmart, because the watch doesn't need much power to merely display the time."
Apple is fixing this problem right now.
Re: American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation?
#8This whole article is assuming that innovation comes from money, and specifically from the money labeled "R&D" in the budgets of nations and companies. Yet, most startups started on shoestrings. Then they got investment from VC firms. These sources of innovation don't come from NSF or Microsoft Research. And American innovation comes from far more than money. The culture of American innovation is a huge factor, which…
I totally agree that the American culture is a huge factor. It's as though this article has it backwards, that because there was money, there were risk takers. But I believe that the culture of willingness to risk is the driving force behind the money and the driving force behind much of that nation's successes. Fortune favours the bold.
Secondarily, as public money from governments and money from large corporations dry up, innovation and risks are taken on by other parties. The article completely avoids crowdsourcing such as Kickstarter campaigns, an example of innovation being Oculus and their Rift.
As the cost of innovating decreases, innovation decentralization increases.
Re: American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation?
#9This whole article is assuming that innovation comes from money, and specifically from the money labeled "R&D" in the budgets of nations and companies. Yet, most startups started on shoestrings. Then they got investment from VC firms. These sources of innovation don't come from NSF or Microsoft Research. And American innovation comes from far more than money. The culture of American innovation is a huge factor, which…
There are things that startups can address and there are things that they cannot. For little things that address a known or suspected market demand it is possible for a privately-operated business to develop new science. But when it comes to total blue sky research without any concept of a marketable product, and/or anything involving big science, then the private sector is not the ideal model.
Re: American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation?
#10What about the people angle (as in People, Process, Technology)?
I don't know how it used to be 20, 30 or 50 years ago, but if you have sat in a graduate science/technology/engineering course classroom in any US university in the last few years and surveyed the demographic profile of your fellow classmates you might notice something.
The percentage of students of Asian ethnicity will probably outnumber all other groups combined. I admit this is only anecdotal.
A fairly large percentage of those students (who are not already US citizens) will try to find work here and contribute to the US economy if they can. However due to the increasingly difficult immigration climate many of them will return home and become the spearhead of innovation for their home countries.
I don't know if that is the same in the US undergraduate programs.
In net, you have two factors here, 1. Fewer US based students are going into graduate STEM programs. 2. More US educated foreign STEM graduate students are being trained to contribute to your future competitors.
I wonder what that does that to the long term prospects for home grown innovation in the US.
Just citing one study [1] below. I am sure there are even more counter studies.
[1] http://www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/2014/geograph...