America Lacks Meaningful Innovation

Health care's problems in the United States are not technical. Health Care's problems are regulatory, and systemic. (My day job is in health care for the last 20 years in 35 hospitals in 5 states.) Health care's problems in poor countries are primarily due to a lack of hygine and clean water. Most of the rest of their problems can be helped with decent tropical disease vaccine research. That’s not an interest or willingness issue, that’s a funding and economics issue.

There are massive amounts of funding for clean/green tech right now. Those innovations are going to be hard, and come slowly, but we do have a lot of brilliant minds working on those problems.

I dare say I have a front seat at the innovation table by hosting the largest group of garage stage startups at Hackers & Founders Silicon Valley. I see a lot of amazingly cool stuff months before it hits event the startup press.

Here's what I see:

Founders building social media startups are rare. Precious few founders think about monetizing via ads, unless they are building a search engine. Funding for ad based, or social media startups are hard to come by unless they show tons of traction before funding.

The coolest apps I'm seeing built are hardware peripherals to mobile phones or mobile devices: An ultrasound probe attached to an iPhone that can serve as a fetal heart monitor. Motion tracking devices that can be attached to your head and ankle so you can control a racing game on your iPad while excdcising on your bike.

There’s a ton of innovation happening around the food space, creating new markets for food producers and consumers.

There are also companies like Genomera.com, which is building a system for crowd sourced clinical trials. Factual.com is building an open source model around big data.

BioCurious is a very cool hacker space/community around DIY bio that’s getting organized. As the costs of bio hacking come down, there’s going to be a ton of innovation there.

There’s tons of innovation surrounding the Kinect. I talked with the CEO of Health 2.0 a few weeks ago, and a Neurologist and a programmer got together at one of their hackathons, and in a weekend, built a pediatric gait abnormality monitor. Wait until the official SDK comes out, and drivers are included in Windows 8, and you’re going to see some really cool things.

The very fabric and character of Silicon Valley is changing because of innovation in how companies are funded (Angel List). Hundreds, and soon thousands of two to four person startups are going to be funded. I believe what’s going to happen is because of that, the rate of innovation in Silicon Valley and around the globe is going to accelerate dramatically.

You complain that there's no innovation because everybody is just building gadgets. Gadgets like cell phones are revolutionizing 3rd world economies, and mobile payments via cell phones are creating truly disruptive innovation like electronic banking and electronic money transfer. I visited my brother doing economic development in Honduras, and most everyone carries a cell phone, even if they live in a house with a dirt floor.

Have you looked at the innovations that are happening in robotics? My nephew is studying at a community college in rural Minnesota right now, and he’s in a robotics competition. He’s programming a robot that can crawl around and check to see if a seedling tree is dead or not. If it’s dead, the robot pulls the seedling. If not, it keeps driving.

Open your eyes. Stop reading Tech Crunch. Go to Maker Faire. Awesome things are happening and you don’t even realize it.

And, if you're sick of the lack of innovation... then create something. Complaining about it online does nothing.

Offer any 25 year old this choice:

a) You can be paid $100k/year and work on space travel.

b) You can go found a photosharing startup and I'll fund it.

The far majority will choose (a).

But guess what? No one is funding space travel, and when they do fund space travel, the 25-year-olds they hire are generally just sexy female secretaries who fetch them coffee.

Offer a 25 year old a challenging job in the space travel field and he will take it. The jobs aren't there. No one with money gives a fuck about space travel aside from Richard Branson who won't hire me because I don't have 30 years of experience being a rocket scientist.

Why is it so hard to become an apprentice to a rocket scientist? Why are there so few jobs in this field, and so many in sharing photos and affiliate marketing?

Entertainment is an end in itself. Marketing is a means to an end without (much) intrinsic value. These two things are as far apart as two economic activities can ever be.

We'll remember Facebook in ten years the way we remember MySpace now: We don't. Facebook changes nothing.

"Health Care" and the medical industry are not the same thing and that's one of the biggest mental blocks America has. I did the homemaker and full-time mom thing for 2 decades and it allowed me to keep my son with cystic fibrosis remarkably healthy in spite of not having a diagnosis until late in life. Later we were both diagnosed. Because I did the full time mom thing for so long and my idea of "health care" included things like cooking and cleaning (instead of drugs and surgeries), I was able to get well after spending a year at death's door.

I've got your health care talent and innovation right here: http://healthgazelle.com/ and it has nothing to do with the current medical industry.

Now I just need to grow it, learn to write code and create a more information-dense delivery mechanism (aka game).