I think the reason that the US comes up with so many really important ideas is that it approaches the problem from so many different directions. The DoD finance a lot of projects, large US multinationals run big projects, some of which create value from their spinoffs (Unix was created by programmers who got fed up with Burrough's Multics OS), university departments have lots of research projects, most of which go nowhere, random individuals work alone.
But cheap finance via venture capital is very important too. The book "The Power Law" by Sebastian Mallaby is very good on this. The title is taken from the distribution of returns from firms in a VC portfolio (more correctly termed a 'Pareto Distribution', but presumably one vetoed by the publishers). Allowing a tiny handful of inventors to get rich beyond the dreams of avarice really seems to create a virtuous circle. Maybe the point is that these guys never can spend their money, so end up endlessly recycling it into promising startups, like the sort of companies they themselves started 30 years previously.
I find it frustrating how often universities get blamed for this problem. The government has a policy to make them engage with external partners - impact assessed via the REF - it is just very bad at achieving the kinds of things you describe here. The last government, if anything, made it even worse on these axes. The idea that universities are, off their own bat, going to do the kind of incubation work and deep research alluded to in this post, when the research funding structure strongly incentivises the opposite, strikes me as implausible.
Before trying to come up with an entirely new innovation ecosystem, we could try pointing the one we already have roughly in the direction we want and seeing if that makes a difference.
Thank you for this, Neil. It is a remarkable story, isn't it, and a valuable reminder of the convoluted way that innovation often works.
An innovation point that fascinates me was the Xerox PARC project and the interaction design work that took place there. It was just stunning. Things like the mouse and the desktop display. Fabulous.
There's a great account of this work in 'Designing Interactions' by Bill Moggridge.
I think the reason that the US comes up with so many really important ideas is that it approaches the problem from so many different directions. The DoD finance a lot of projects, large US multinationals run big projects, some of which create value from their spinoffs (Unix was created by programmers who got fed up with Burrough's Multics OS), university departments have lots of research projects, most of which go nowhere, random individuals work alone.
But cheap finance via venture capital is very important too. The book "The Power Law" by Sebastian Mallaby is very good on this. The title is taken from the distribution of returns from firms in a VC portfolio (more correctly termed a 'Pareto Distribution', but presumably one vetoed by the publishers). Allowing a tiny handful of inventors to get rich beyond the dreams of avarice really seems to create a virtuous circle. Maybe the point is that these guys never can spend their money, so end up endlessly recycling it into promising startups, like the sort of companies they themselves started 30 years previously.
An interesting post - thanks.
I find it frustrating how often universities get blamed for this problem. The government has a policy to make them engage with external partners - impact assessed via the REF - it is just very bad at achieving the kinds of things you describe here. The last government, if anything, made it even worse on these axes. The idea that universities are, off their own bat, going to do the kind of incubation work and deep research alluded to in this post, when the research funding structure strongly incentivises the opposite, strikes me as implausible.
Before trying to come up with an entirely new innovation ecosystem, we could try pointing the one we already have roughly in the direction we want and seeing if that makes a difference.
Thank you for this, Neil. It is a remarkable story, isn't it, and a valuable reminder of the convoluted way that innovation often works.
An innovation point that fascinates me was the Xerox PARC project and the interaction design work that took place there. It was just stunning. Things like the mouse and the desktop display. Fabulous.
There's a great account of this work in 'Designing Interactions' by Bill Moggridge.
Thanks, again, for the post.
Thanks for the tip!