"Wayne Lundberg" <waynelund@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
> I have been active in this newsgroup along with a few others on
> entrepreneur****p, innovation and new business startups only to
> discover that in the last three to five years no really significant
> innovation has hit the market.
(snip)
> In following alt.inventors newsgroup we see occasional claimants to
> perpetual motion and the like, but not much in the real of real world,
> possible applications of new, innovative technology.
(snip)
Indeed. Often when I get out of date in some field, and worry I'll be
left far behind, when I come back to it I'm quite relieved/disappointed
to discover that catchup isn't going to be too hard. Similarly, the more
I've learned about various businesses, the more I've been surprised at
how they don't do things in a more sophisticated way by now.
> With the politicians pulling our chains on the energy thing by
artificially
> making oil scarce, they may be, in fact, promoting innovation. Not means
of
> finding alternative sources of energy, but maybe a completely different
> life-style paradigm ****ft.
> Is anybody here seeing anything like a breakthrough to the future?
I hope social/political opinion isn't too out of place here. In short,
personally, I'm not. As my other post in this thread probably hints in
part: I think that the US relies a lot on foreign graduate students for
the lead in innovation that it does have and I think the US education
system doesn't do well in producing graduates that can think creatively
and critically and who have the technical knowledge and skills to apply
that, and I think that the data backs me up on that. I could speculate
as to why that is but what intrigues me most is a cultural phenomenon I
see here where many students seem less interested in getting the tools
to do useful, interesting stuff than they are in getting qualifications
that leads to nice jobs, and that becomes very clear when in interview I
start to ask technical applicants about the work they've done and the
courses they took.
Three factors don't make me extremely hopeful about a near-term ****nier
future: (1) the massive Federal debt makes it hard for the government to
spend a lot on educational improvements or high risk / high payoff
programs (e.g., DoD R&D spending has been more conservative in recent
years) for a long time to come; (2) the economy (domestic and
international) is going to remain unkind to the hordes of blue-collar
workers who want to rely more on protectionism than retraining, which is
going to lead to a politically powerful lobby that I think is going to
cost the US in not knowing or wanting to face the facts; (3) the
domestic terrorism fear / US foreign policy, which is going to inhibit
US ability to benefit from foreign-born innovators, and that, like (2),
I think is also mostly borne out of counterproductive, fearful ignorance
(and maybe a bit of national narcissism).
Frankly, I'd already be living overseas if my wife wasn't so keen on
living in the US. Per capita, you see more technical skill and
entrepreneur****p coming from India than you do here. (And we probably
will in China as they continue to shed Con****ian attitudes.) Just in
simple things like, say, cars: I've seen in cars I rented in Europe
years ago useful features I still haven't seen in cars I rented here,
and when I've wanted to buy things here like, say, an efficient 4x4 car,
it just didn't exist in the US market at all. I am guessing that this is
somehow an effect of trade barriers raised through the efforts of the
domestic auto lobby, but it's a general pattern I see of resistance to
adopting better technical solutions that weren't of domestic origin,
especially with regard to industry standards in engineered products.
Sorry to be such a pessimist: I could talk more about /why/ I think the
above, but I'm trying to limit myself to just describing the impressions
of reality that I think relate to projections for innovative business in
the US. Bill Gates has already done some of the explanatory work for me,
in his testimony at http://help.senate.gov/Hearings/2007_03_07/Gates.pdf
I think that the US will continue to be a major player for a long time
to come: it has a very good international image for innovation and
entrepreneur****p, and it is still a very rich country with good
universities. But, in many ways, I think it could be better if people
were a bit more informed and rational. One of the great things about
self-employment is that it's one of the harsh knocks that might actually
bring you into contact with reality.
A couple of comments on specific fields mentioned in this thread:
The only significant energy-related breakthrough that I expect in the
medium term is in battery technology. There's plausibly a lot of room
for improvement and something that has the capacity of a battery but the
power delivery and charging characteristics of a supercapacitor would be
quite a breakthrough. However, my impression is that it's the Japanese
who are leading the edge of this field, if anyone is. (They already had
HDTV for decades too!) Renewable energy is going to be a drop in the
ocean of demand for a long time to come, but nuclear might buy us the
time for longer-term lifestyle change over the course of the century.
Biotechnology's an interesting one. To an extent, I think the US is
going to shoot itself in the foot a little, again through the foreign
student issue, and also through ideology that means that things like
stem cell research and cloning are so inhibited within the US that they
get done elsewhere. But, even given that, I suspect that biotechnology's
a field where the US will continue to be a major player for the
forseeable future. Information technology will be, too, despite the way
that the US patent system cripples adoption of innovations in the field.
In terms of lifestyle change in general, one thing the US /could/ do
successfully is increase telecommuting for white-collar jobs. There are
a lot of white-collar jobs that need done, and that could be done
largely remotely given near-term technology. Over coming years we're
going to see widespread rollout of things like WiMAX (enabling
videotelephony, frequent exchange of much data with central business
servers, etc.) (it's interesting to watch things like Tata's rollout of
WiMAX in India), and the US is so large and diverse that telecommuting
will greatly expand the available pool of attractive employees for
domestic businesses. It also helps a lot to address dependence on oil.
However, I fear that conservatism is a big impediment. Conservatism in
business models generally holds back communications-related things
(e.g., look at how telephone companies and the entertainment industry
have still not realized or come to terms with what a difference the
Internet makes). Conservatism in business culture still makes so many
managers think that the best way to maintain productivity is to make
sure that employees are visibly sitting in a work environment for a
certain number of hours each day and that more working hours is the key
to more productivity, instead of simply periodically reviewing their
actual work product (perhaps partly because in many cases they're not
really competent to do so) and talking to their employees about what
gets in the way of getting their job done - generally and specifically.
Larger businesses here tend to be very risk-averse - if they fail it's
not usually because they implemented some courageous new thinking. Major
successes normally only come at greater risk of failure, but people are
scared of the devastating blame that a failure would attract, so they
keep their job by doing things in the way everyone else does it and has
done it for years. Related to the conservatism issue is that part of the
attraction of self-employment for me is that I can arrange things in a
way that allows me to get the most, best work done, instead of having my
productivity sucked up by restrictive managers/policies that manage risk
but also stifle innovation.
I suppose that the telecommuting would require rather more goal-based
self-management than I'm used to seeing in American graduates, though.
For instance, for my undergraduate degree in Europe, the lion's share of
my grade came from answering examination questions at the end of each
/year/ on the various courses over that year for which I did not have to
register, turn up for cl*****, nor hand in homeworks: I was trusted, if
I wanted, to simply manage my own study. I'd be very interested to see
what the average undergraduate student from the average American state
college would do with that freedom over the course of each year.
I should mention that I'm not posting the above with the intent to
persuade anyone of my views, nor even with the expectation that I
especially have the time to defend them - really, I'm just trying to
answer the question's solicitation of our two cents, and frankly I'm
raising more questions in the above than I'm answering, given the US'
strong history of entrepreneur****p and innovation (though the fraction
of the world's im****tant things that were invented by Americans tends to
be rather smaller than Americans tend to think (-:). And, of course, I
know I'm painting some very general brush strokes here for which a
legion of exceptions apply, but I'm just trying to post a USENET article
here, not writing a book or a thesis! Also, no doubt my opinion is
colored by being an immigrant who is employing Americans - the ones I
employ I'm very glad I found, it was just harder than it ought to have
been to find them.
Mark
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