"That's fine, that's capitalism - and these incremental improvements lead to slow productivity gains that at least quicken the pulse of economists. But maybe let's drop the pretense that we're curing cancer unless, you know, we're curing cancer."
Reasonable and astute point.
"An Economist article this year exploring the state of innovation noted that centuries of scientific progress means it takes ever longer for people to reach to the frontier of any field, much less push past it. It also stressed that much of the technological low-hanging fruit is long gone."
Also true, and oft-overlooked.
"Thiel is at least putting his money where his mouth is at Founders Fund, his venture capital firm making investments into robotics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology (alongside a lineup of dot-coms)."
Ironically, AI was jump-started by DOD dollars,[1] and biotechnology by NIH dollars. Robotics had substantial manufacturing implications and got money from that area, but has also benefited heavily from defense money (think UAV's, etc).
It would seem that capitalism has done a great job solving problems where value-creation yield a sustainable level of value-capture: farming, manufacturing, etc.
However, there's a lot things where there's a ton of value-creation without enough capture. This is where collective action problems must be solved. This could be a consortia like an IEEE standard, gov't funding like the NSF, or something like a city. Many options, but none purely capitalist in the traditional sense of the word.
> Only governments had the long view and available cash to fund things like supercolliders, deep space programs and - oh yeah - the development of the Internet.
When you're spending billions/trillions of tax dollars, you're going to have successes here and there.
There's no question that the government has some successes to point to. I actually agree that government is decent at some basic research.
Then again, the private sector has had plenty of successes as well.
My main objection is that we don't really understand the opportunity cost of having the government spend the money vs letting the private economy do so itself - yet we let the government continue to make the decisions on what's fair.
Can you elaborate why that is ironic? Most of the basic science is funded by governments (throughout the world, not just the US). Isn't that supposed to be the role of government (funding research that has no immediate financial prospects)?
These articles are easy to write (and upvote) but such conclusions are pretty meaningless till you have a definition of what counts as innovation. That's a very interesting question, and yet just about everyone who talks about this topic ducks it and goes instead for the easy score.
Maybe we can do better here on HN. What's the right way to measure innovation? E.g. surely the 5 year old's definition (big shiny things that fly through the air are innovative, and invisible software isn't) is mistaken. But what would a good measure be?
The appeal of these articles is that they speak our unspoken thoughts. When someone tells you about the snapchat/instagram clone they are building at a startup event, you are socially obligated to smile and say something nice about it. But on the inside you wonder at an economic system that puts people through two decades of training so that they can apply their talents to such activities. Meanwhile, companies doing big things find it tough to hire as they are competing with seed funding for your own cat pictures startup.
When I moved out to Silicon Valley it was right before the Groupon IPO and hundreds of man-years were being spent on Groupon clones. Of course nobody remembers them now.
I like Yvon Chouinard's definition of innovation, which I'll paraphrase as: Invention is the creation of new things, and innovation is the application of inventions to solve problems for lots of people.
I like this definition because I think it accomodates the fact that a lot of products that are obviously inventive, fail to succeed in the marketplace or change many people's lives. Examples include Google Wave, the Apple Newton, etc. It also accomodates companies like Apple today, which do succeed in the marketplace and change many people's lives, despite inventing very few things themselves.
So when we look at the state of Silicon Valley today we can see that there are companies like Apple and Facebook that are innovative despite not being inventive. And then there are initiatives like Google's glasses and self-driving car that, while incredibly inventive, can't really be considered innovative (at least not yet).
I think it's important to realize in answering that question a few things.
a) The answer to the question isn't digital (black and white) it's analog. It's a matter of degree and relative to the thing being considered. Curing cancer - say, up near 100. Cat photo app, say, down near 0. And everything in between. (Numbers arbitrary to make a point.)
b) Most people could probably have an easier time (like identifying porn) with what isn't innovation than defining what is innovation.
c) Daniel Markham's points regarding sometimes meaningless things lead to important things.
Lastly, none of this matters. If you are in high school it's a sure bet you will attract women and attention (at that age) as the high school quarterback even if you have average looks. People arguing that the system should change and the guy with glasses who will be a much better catch down the road won't get anyone anywhere. Things are the way they are for a reason.
I suspect that YC invests in the best situations they can find given a pool of applicants applying your patterns etc and knowledge of the past. Questions posed by this article (and some of the comments here) assume that markets operate together in collusion for the common good. They don't. If they did it would be relatively easy to get food companies to stop pushing valueless tasty food on the public as well.
Likewise these articles are easy to dismiss if you're too far into the SV bubble. Maybe you can qualify why this article is meaningless and answer its points instead of waiving it off? Otherwise you seem to have an unexamined prejudice against criticisms of the venture capital community's funding choices.
By the very nature of innovation you can't define what it is just like you can't ever say for certain whether some abstract piece of pure mathematics will ever contribute to engineering or science (as it very often has). However, like mathematicians we can make educated guesses on what IS NOT relevant or innovative, and by extension will never be relevant or innovative. And of course we will be wrong some times.
The very fact that you think there is a "right way" to "measure" innovation makes me think this article is pretty spot on. Innovation isn't a business, it's not a product or a user base, it's not a stock ticker. More often than not, innovation is the result of thousands, if not millions, of man-hours of passionate and extremely intelligent people who care about their work and want to ACHIEVE something that is currently impossible, impractical, or even undesirable. You can't measure or predict this, all you can do is find those passionate, intelligent people (here's where the measurement part sort of comes in) and give them the resources and support to do something great.
The point of the article is that last part is not happening. There are so many passionate and intelligent people in the Valley but almost no one is giving them the chance to do something great.
I think new economies is a good proxy. The computer invented an entirely new economy. So did the automobile, computer networking, television, radio, the telegraph, electricity, air travel, moving pictures, recorded audio, the light bulb, washing machine, dishwasher, etc. All of these things created not just the immediate industry, but an entire ecosystem of products and services related to the industry.
You could probably also measure it in terms of essential inventions: we can't live without the internet, but if Instagram or Facebook went away tomorrow, we'd have lots of alternatives for sharing photos and talking to our friends. Instagram and Facebook make those things nicer, but don't allow us to do anything we weren't doing before. The internet (or, I guess, the web) allowed for entirely new forms of communication and commerce.
From my perspective, we haven't seen a new economy emerge in the last decade, at least. The internet (maybe molecular biology) was the last invention to really create a new industry, and that was the mid-90s. Maybe robotics is the next one, but it's hard to tell prospectively.
2) 10-year moving average of the duration of subsistence living expenses that can be funded from a fixed weight of gold.
Both of these are very high level measures that fold in a lot of underlying technological progress. (1) is weighted towards computation and biotech, (2) against mining and expansion into space (would have to be weighted somehow there to be useful much past the next 20 years), but both encompass far more than that.
Both incorporate advantages provided by fluff technologies such as networking tools, but so many levels removed that we don't have to stop arguing over whether they should be dropped in a well or not. This may or may not be a benefit from your point of view.
I like Clay Christensen's model for innovation [1]. He has a top level categorization of sustaining innovation and disruptive innovation.
Sustaining innovations are about making products in existing markets better and are further broken down into continuous innovation and discontinuous or radical innovations. The metrics here are about if the new innovation is improving performance within an existing market and by existing value metrics, and by how much. Continuous innovations are small improvements, radical innovations are large improvements.
Disruptive innovations are also broken down into two categories. There is the low end disruption whereby a product is competing in the same space as existing ones, but comes in from below. These are often cheaper and worse to start with, but then move up market as technology improves. There are many examples here (eg Arm coming in under x86). The other disruptive innovation is the new market innovation. In Christensen's terminology, these products compete against non-competition. There is a need, but no products fullfils that need until the disruption comes along. These products are tricky for several reasons. For one, there is no existing market and therefore traditional market research doesn't work. Instead, the execution plan needs to be focused on learning what the market is and what the customer needs are.
I want to call out how they discuss innovation: Ultimately, innovation is a means to an end — a competence for generating profitable growth opportunities and improving the organization's competitiveness. A holistic measurement system needs to have three perspectives: performance, strength of the competence, and strategic application of the competence. The performance perspectives report out the "returns" or "results" of an organization's innovation program(s) while the competence perspectives report out the ability to envision and implement innovative opportunities. The strategy perspective outlines the criticality and impact of innovation in the organization's strategic direction.
Hopefully we can get some good discussion going on this topic as in my day-to-day work, we frequently discuss with large enterprise customers how they handle change management. Frequently we discuss it in the context of IPM (innovation process management) and how to create organizations that benefit from managing innovation; and more broadly speaking, what types of software or tools they need to successfully handle this change.
It's true. But also somewhat reminiscent of the "What is a startup?" discussion a few months back which was inconclusive. It seems "everyone knows what it is but no one can explain it" But to take a stab at it I'd say the level of innovation is directly tied to the amount of economic improvement and/or life improvement that results. Internet = huge change in economic efficiencies and life improvement. ("Life improvement" would have to be related to time free'ed up to spend on other goals) Mobile the same.
I used to view innovation as: making it possible to do something that wasn't possible before (going from 0 to 1). But under that definition alone, SpaceX would not be very innovative. It's just sometimes when you go from 1 to N but the N is so large (like SpaceX case) it's probably a different kind of innovation. And by making the N that large, it's starts to look a lot like 0-1 and new opportunities arise, like the chance of getting to Mars (which is definitely 0-1)
Like all attempts to objectify the subjective, the analysis usually fall short and can be easily gamed. For example, large tech firms such as SAP say they are more innovative because the amount of R&D money they spend. I don't think it's worth putting the term 'innovation' on a measuring stick.
Pick a problem that needs solving. For the
solution, use 'innovation'.
Then want the 'innovation' to be ideas, essentially
applied research, that can be presented and
evaluated usually just on paper. So, as in
peer-reviewed published papers, the ideas should be
"new, correct, and significant", and, for innovation
in business, powerful and valuable for solving the
problem. Moreover, we should be able to check these
criteria mostly just on paper.
Then we measure the innovation by the ROI of the
solution it provides.
Is that the only way to make money? No.
But this approach to innovation has one heck of a
good track record for delivering terrific solutions
for challenging problems via the US DoD since the
start of WWII, and there the batting average is much
higher than for information technology venture
capital.
Moreover, and definitely should not be lost, and for
70 years has been understood with great clarity by
both the US DoD and Congress, the real foundations
of such innovation are pure and applied research as
in our top two dozen or so US research universities
(where about 60% of the annual budget comes from NSF
and NIH for US national security and health care)
with more in Federally Funded Research and
Development Centers (the FFRDCs) and then more at
Raytheon, United Technologies, GE, Lockheed-Martin,
Boeing, General Dynamics, Hughes Electronics, etc.
In total, Congress authorizes big bucks for all that
work, and Congress 'gets it'. However, Silicon
Valley wants to laugh at research and then turn and
run away afraid of it.
US information technology (IT) venture capital has
had a 'business model': Wait for 'traction' to be
significant and growing rapidly but, still, for some
reason or other, the company still not very
profitable, and hope that then the founders will
need money for the 'big build out', hiring bizdev
and marketing people, setting up the sales force in
the 'channels', etc. for the 'execution', or be so
eager for "cash now" for 'the good life' that they
will sign a bad business deal. Alas, as reported at
AVC.COM recently, the ROI has been lower than an
index fund.
Also there is an incongruity: A small information
technology startup with traction significant and
growing rapidly is in a much better position than
millions of US Main Street entrepreneurs who make
it without an expensive 'build-out' with bizdev,
marketing, channel people, business expertise from
former management consultants, etc.
For venture partners able to evaluate innovation,
i.e., applied research, just on paper, YC is
exceptionally good. Then there's Wegner at Union
Square, Morgan at First Round, Metcalf at Polaris,
Bayless at Sevin-Rosen, and a few more. There are,
what, all together in all of the US, 20?
And then there is the list of venture partners who
prefer to invest in college dropouts.
In college, at universities, at several
laboratories, at GE, IBM, JHU/APL, and more, I have
worked with many people good at doing and evaluating
applied research. Alas in US venture capital, that
list of 20 is about all I can find that is
comparable.
With the ROI south of the index funds, it looks like
there will be some changes that Darwin would
understand.
If you want to make a difference, quit trying to cash out as a 25 year old millionaire.
Get a PhD and do research. That's the real risk in life, that you might work your ass off for little pay, spend 30 years chasing a dream, and fail in the end.
But the people who succeed change the world.
Interestingly, most Nobel Prize winners donate a large percentage of their prize money to charity or research. They weren't interested in early retirement in the first place.
But if you drop the pretense, how will you continue to convince everyone that SV is the center of the tech universe and that everything worthwhile that happens must originate or migrate to those few square miles on the planet?
Clayton Christensen was profiled in Wired recently and came to a similar conclusion:
"We’ve encouraged managers to measure profitability based on a return on net assets, or return on capital employed. That encourages companies to liberate their capital, so they invest in efficiency innovations, which means they can make more money with fewer resources. But what the economy ultimately needs are empowering innovations—like the Model T, the transistor radio. Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years. So companies are using capital to create more capital, and consequently the world is awash in capital but the innovations we need to advance aren’t there."
There is a clear hostility toward digital products. If a physical product that shows up a screen in the air (holoscreen) to Skype another person, all people would suddenly scream: OH, that's innovation. Yet Skyping through an LCD screen gives the same result.
If BMW or Tesla design a futuristic looking key for a car, we call that innovation and cool. But a nice designed interface, is just another interface.
If some scientists burn a whole lot of money* to analyze DNA data, we call that innovation and science. However, when app ABC tries to connect people and do some social work, we call that another social app and a Facebook clone.
Please stop the hostility. Creating a new API library or writing code that does something new is indeed "Innovation". It's certainly not getting to the moon, but it's still a very little bit of innovation.
The new Internet enabled me, from a small third-world country to create a sizable income (at least comparing to my country per capita), learn a "LOT" and build a viable business.
Internet put aside, I have no chance of making even $1000/year in my country. That, and the fact that I started from exactly nothing (family computer) is for me this decade "miracle". The innovation in payments, digital products, advertising... have improved access to wealth and mobility.
I guess, the problem of the majority of people is access to wealth. There is too much wealth around (look at the majority of jobs, they are about moving wealth and not creating it e.g. doctors, lawyers, gov., traders, brokers, middle men...).
Access to wealth will improve the life of the average person more than accessing the moon. The Internet offers an unmatched opportunity to access wealth.
Please innovate in HTML, JavaScript and Servers.
* I'm not nitpicking on data scientists or any body, just to give an example.
If you are considering a new startup idea and you think "that sounds easy, I can build it in a month", then you are most likely entering a crowded market where your startup will not add much marginal value to the world. This is most consumer startups.
If instead, your idea makes you say "That sounds hard. I'm going to have to overcome technical challenges/ accumulate domain expertise/ leap regulatory hurdles" then you are most likely breaking new ground, adding significant value to society, and creating something hard to copy.
As much as I am happy for the success of the snapchats of the world (and the army of snapchat clones), I don't think the world would miss them very much if they were gone.
Edit: Seriously, I really want to know what people think about the question at the end. I worked with someone who works at cd2, and on a selfish note I'm just curious.
I'm a "pasty scientist" paid by DARPA, in biotech. I work for someone who previously founded a brain-machine-interface company that had a small IPO (cyberkinetics). I would love nothing more than to see things I work on get turned into viable products. This seems to require two things: a) public investment in vague-but-cool-sounding-what-if projects, and b) easy ways to translate them into usable products.
For (a), someone should be funding things that might be valuable "platforms" for society: the human genome project, ARPANet, basic mathematics research (Fourier analysis, instrumental in many, many commercial products, was one such basic mathematical result for a long time). The value of these platforms may take a long time to pan out (if ever), so it makes sense to fund them as a society. Perhaps government per se isn't required - it could be done by some collection of nonprofits - but the funding won't come from many private firms. Further, if we want these platforms to be of use to many companies, perhaps they shouldn't come from private firms.
I think about it like I think about LAPACK. LAPACK is used by almost every scientific computing library for matrix multiplication. Now if Intel and AMD want to come along and make proprietary versions of it (e.g. Intel's Math Kernel Library), or if Matlab or Mathematica want to wrap them into an easy-to-use product, or someone needs it for a robot controller for a factory, that's awesome! The point is that there is some value in public research the market can draw on to make nice things (the ROI on LAPACK must be HUGE for whatever nominal cost + non-nominal man-hours it takes).
(b) is difficult, but there have been some efforts. One such is INVO[0], an effort at Northwestern that helps researchers develop their ideas without losing too much control in the process. They just founded cd2[1], the center for device development, that helps clinicians and engineers navigate the bureaucratic and regulatory hoops, and ultimately pitch. The key is that like YC, they have a strong network of people who understand this process, who to talk to, what you're really signing when you sign a piece of paper, etc. They pay you (for a year!) to work on your project.
My question (updated for clarity): What do potential founders of not-widget-startups want to be able to pursue the kind of innovation mentioned in the article? In particular, what would help translate academic proof-of-concept ideas into viable, fundable, products?
It would seem that asking VC's to fund cooler projects at the expense of profits is not the right way to go. Maybe a better strategy is to ease the link between cutting-edge research and consumer-facing products. What would help with that?
There are no more tech startups. There are startups that use technology, but writing CRUD apps to manage house cleaners and town cars isn't developing new technology.
Your question reminds me of the article yesterday that suggested an "x prize for everything" [0]. I have heard many people say that the really hard part is the goal setting and determining which problems to solve, which you include in your question. Maybe the problem is that there is not a strong enough connection between the academic proof-of-concept ideas and the people who have the power to set the goals. In a perfect world, these proof-of-concept ideas would be the inspiration for an x-prize. The competition itself acts as a map forward which would generate a bunch of competition to tackle something, with a new industry established as the result. It seems the connection you are looking for isn't necessarily between the proof-of-concept ideas and the products, but rather the proof-of-concept ideas and the market-building-of-the-commons which benefits all participants. Once that exists, VC's can do their jobs to exploit the market.
I'll be honest: I'm not clear on what the question at the end is. Are you saying: it's not easy to turn academic research concepts into commercial products? Well this is precisely what Silicon Valley has learned to do better than anywhere else.
If you're asking how we can make the process better, doesn't it boil down to having investors who see the value of these ideas? You need to frame the business case to them in their lingo.
If they don't want to invest in you because they think the can make more money on BS web investments, then we're all losing. But ultimately there will be a shakeout in web investments...and then there will be a shift back.
Foundations are a possible answer. In the last year we've seen foundations give grants to a number of tech groups and/or platforms. iPython via Sloan and Code for America via Knight for example.
There are many areas where venture capital has not and is not well suited for various reasons, many of which you list. I think people's focus on consumer funding won't work because crowdfunding is even more driven by the allure of consumer facing products than VCs are. Foundations seem to me to be a good place for this.
One issue I have not been able to resolve in thinking about the idea of society-funded research has to do with what I'll refer to as "bad" global actors.
It is no secret that China shines for its lack of respect for intellectual property. The same is true for their willingness to steal just about anything from anyone and make it their own.
If we, as an open society, fund programs costing billions of dollars we would, in no uncertain terms, be "giving it away" to the Chinese and other bad world players.
It's the concept of unfairness when on person in a team does absolutely nothing yet benefits greatly from the work of the rest of the team members.
I know I am over-generalizing. Yet, I have to tell you, as an American citizen I despise the idea of investing my tax dollars in something and have it simply given away to other societies who have done nothing to contribute to the cause.
Would I like to invest tax dollars to find the cure for cancer and make it globally available? Absolutely.
Would I like to see the labs and companies we built as part of that process decimated and driven out of business because the Chinese take the work product we funded and drive costs so far down that our companies crumble under the pressure of our pricing models? Nope. Not interested.
Yes, society as a whole would benefit from cheap mass manufacturing of such a drug. And, while that happens, our industry will continue to be shredded by bad players such as China.
I don't have all the answers. I certainly don't know what the solution to this one might be.
David Wheeler has an interesting list of what he considers to be important software innovations. [1] Most of the innovations listed occurred in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.
An interesting quote from an article[2] about an interview with Linus Torvalds in LWN.net:
"A member of the audience asked Linus to describe his single most memorable moment from the last 20 years. Linus responded that he didn't really have one; the kernel is the result of lots of small ideas contributed by lots of people over a long time. There has been no big "ah ha!" moment. He went on to describe a pet peeve of his with regard to the technology industry: there is a great deal of talk about "innovation" and "vision." People want to hear about the one big idea that changes the world, but that's not how the world works. It's not about visionary ideas; it's about lots of good ideas which do not seem world-changing at the time, but which turn out to be great after lots of sweat and work have been applied."
"But these aren't free market aberrations brought on by regulations. They're the invisible hand of capitalism itself: reaching out for quick gains while avoiding as much downside risk as possible."
Oh boy. We've got political commentary trying to pose as analysis.
Okay, let's get this straight: capitalism drives efficiencies in markets. Efficiencies drive innovation. If you look at this only in terms of money, you're missing the point.
So you have this huge bunch of people over many decades making things just a little better than before. Another person comes along and, now that many different pieces are much more efficient than before, connects them in new and innovative ways.
You don't have a Wright Brothers without machine tools, bicycle parts, and so on -- each of which was a tiny bit better than the thing before it. You don't have a Facebook without an internet, cheap bandwidth, and ubiquitous computing. Facebook wasn't "looking for quick gains while avoiding as much downside..", it was a more efficient way to keep up to date on important social information.
Yeah, every now and then somebody does this one thing that we all think of as grand. But nine times out of ten? It's only possible because the rest of the world of mankind has evolved. This is why we see so many people discover the same thing at the same time. They're not necessarily copying, it's just that we're ready for that discovery to take place.
This is also what is wrong with VCs (and some government organizations) trying to select what sorts of technologies need more attention: it doesn't work. It's backwards. Sure, you can have a goal that you then reward enough that somebody will reach it. But you can't decide on a solution and then keep dumping money on your solution until it works. "Winning WWII" was a goal the allies had that they were prepared to spend billions on. Because of 1) their resource pool in both money and talent, 2) the desire to have a goal reached instead of a technology deployed, it worked. If they had decided to "build a ray gun" no matter how much money they dropped, it would never be enough.
I'm not crazy about the day-to-day work of innovation, the guys making the better widgets, the folks making gears turn with less friction, the folks making farts come out of your iPhone. These aren't very sexy and nobody likes writing news pieces about them. But taken altogether, it's a million of these things that lead to the next cognitive jump in mankind.
If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished. So let's see $50 Billion to anybody who can take us to a repeatable $10/kilo to low earth orbit. Or $10 Billion for the first 3D printer able to print an electric car.
If you keep thinking of the problem backwards, in terms of capitalism vs. research, not only will you not be able to solve it, you'll actively and continually destroy resources that could be used in solving it.
"Oh boy. We've got political commentary trying to pose as analysis. Okay, let's get this straight: capitalism drives efficiencies in markets. Efficiencies drive innovation. If you look at this only in terms of money, you're missing the point."
Did you read anything else before you went into Political Strike Mode, or did you just skim it? From the previous section:
"most of Silicon Valley doesn't concern itself with aiming 'almost ridiculously high.' It concerns itself primarily with getting people to click on ads or buy slightly better gadgets than the ones they got last year....that's fine, that's capitalism - and these incremental improvements lead to slow productivity gains that at least quicken the pulse of economists. But maybe let's drop the pretense that we're curing cancer unless, you know, we're curing cancer."
The commentator has no problem with efficiency gains or capitalism. He's just saying that it's hypocritical to spend your life developing sheep-throwing software, while also complaining about how nobody aims for the stars anymore.
"If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished."
Right, like what the NIH and NSF do? Handing out money for research with no immediate commercial intent? Last I checked, that money (along with military spending) built the Valley. Government spending led to innovation.
You're looking for a political fight where none exists. Other than mentioning that Thiel tends to place the blame on the government (which he does), most of the essay is about the need for funding long-term research, not politics.
This notion that people can't pick winners is, in my opinion quite inaccurate. The need for light weight electronics for aerospace systems, and the view that semiconductors were 'the answer' to this problem led to a massive amount of government funding (50% of all R&D funding) and support (the government was far and away the largest customer for semiconductor devices) almost directly led to the creation of the Silicon Valley we are all so proud of [1].
Second, the notion that prizes can solve this problem is simply unreasonable. If a major goal (ie a cure for cancer) takes 20 years to develop, no organization can pursue the goal without intermediate funding. In order to provide intermediate funding with some semblance of accountability, you essentially create the existing R&D structure that exists in America today.
The other advantage to government funding is that with proper open access protocols, innovative ideas aren't trapped in the organizations that created them. There's no doubt that companies like SpaceX could have achieved what they have without the backbone of research done by NASA and published in NASA's amazing technical report series.
"If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished. So let's see $50 Billion to anybody who can take us to a repeatable $10/kilo to low earth orbit. Or $10 Billion for the first 3D printer able to print an electric car."
Arguably that's what government grants do or should do. Taking 50 billion dollars in tax money and stoking the fire in an area we are interested in WITHOUT THE EXPECTATION OF A MONETARY RETURN is the kind of thing the government can and does do. Of course, some of that 50 billion gets eaten by graft, and that's where the problem a lot of people have with government programs. Although private companies don't seem to have any better levels of control (usually much worse control) over corruption, a lot of people seem to think only 100% success demonstrates "working" government.
Also: do you think that perhaps it is wasteful for society's businesses to spend hundreds of billions on marketing and advertising differentiating products like soda, fast food and alcohol? Is that a good use of resources?
I think the critique would be more pointed if he could highlight a backlog of great ideas that Silicon Valley refused to fund. The money is available if you have a big idea. There is plenty going on in Silicon Valley outside photo sharing from biotech to microfinance to clean energy.
Well, you could start (for example) with these lists of unsolved problems in physics[1] and math[2]. I'm sure similar lists exist for every science.
Of course, private industry is interested in funding research in to next to none of them (at least not nearly to the extent that it is in problems that have immediate profitable applications).
For what it's worth, in my experience the people talking about big innovation, actually ARE extremely supportive of genuine, plausible efforts at producing planetary scale improvements. In our case, we're trying to solve the economical energy storage problem (lightsail.com)
These folks put their money where their mouth is, and helped out greatly when we needed advice or funding or connections.
Particular people who helped us out and are known to publicly call for and support big innovation include:
Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, Bruce Gibney, Patrick and John Collison, Michael Vassar, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Matthew Nordan, Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates
---
By contrast, most of the other VC firms, and all of the banks, were much less receptive and we did not get anywhere with them.
So I think people are at least trying to act consistent with their philosophy. Generally, these folks will try to support great groups doing potentially great things, if there is good chemistry. They can't do it all, of course. There are not that many of them. But they try!
I think more of the blame should be on entrepreneurs and scientists who can and want to work in these areas but choose not to, and instead go into the hot software field of choice, or worse, undifferentiated finance. They should be encouraged to make some attempt at making the difference in the world that they want to see. It is not someone else's duty.
If you can do something important, and you have the resources to make a good attempt, you should try, because you may be in a very unique position to do so, and it's incredibly thin on the ground in many important areas.
There are incredibly few companies genuinely trying to make energy storage economical. There's only one, that I can tell, that's trying to make reusable orbit class rockets. There are very few trying to redefine personal computing. There are very few going after cures for cancer, broadly. There are very few effectively trying to make solar economical. There are very few well managed plug-in auto companies. There are very few trying to provide clean, low cost, distributed water. The list goes on.
People working on these major problems keep bumping into each other socially. It does not take long. The population of such entrepreneurs and innovators feels like that of a small high school. This scares me, because there are many, many problems to solve, and many reasons not inherent to the problem or solution that any one company or effort could fail.
There should be more efforts, more ideas, more entrepreneurs, more competitors. That would make me much happier, and feel much safer. At the moment, it feels like if the wrong few people are depressed, sick, or distracted, major world problems are just not getting solved, and the world is set back by as many days.
Lets make it illegal to start a photo/location/$%^ sharing startup. That will clear the space upto 80%. I am just kidding, please don't down vote me if you are running such startup.
> Turning terabytes of genomic knowledge into medical benefit is a lot harder than discovering and mass producing antibiotics
Incidentally, if you'd like to actually turn terabytes of genomic data into actionable medical information, Counsyl is hiring software developers https://jobs.counsyl.com
Just like Levchin, we can find this article inspiring, but neither has hard numbers to back up their claim. Sure, we see a trend that there are a lot of innovations in the ways we communicate, share, and connect, but does that necessarily mean we're lacking "deep" technological innovation?
Personally I think web & mobile startups are getting easier to create so more people are becoming entrepreneurs to take advantage of that; the pie is getting bigger. I believe there are still plenty of "deep" tech innovators out there along with investors who believe in them.
Perhaps these "deep" tech innovators don't get much media coverage because they don't need it, therefore we don't usually hear about them.
I agree with the article.True innovation is hard to find.Look at the startups promoted by incubators.Most of them are some sort of apps.We definitely need pure innovation, something so different, that will change all our lives.
And you can see here the difference between an idea-man and an innovator.Because in my opinion an idea-man can have good ideas and make some money out of them but an innovator will have brilliant ideas, passion to build something extraordinary, smart, without money being the first priority.His goal is to change the world.Now that is someone I would like to work with, not the typical I-have-an-idea-you-build-it-and-I-will-come-later-to-see-whatsup.
[+] [-] rayiner|13 years ago|reply
Reasonable and astute point.
"An Economist article this year exploring the state of innovation noted that centuries of scientific progress means it takes ever longer for people to reach to the frontier of any field, much less push past it. It also stressed that much of the technological low-hanging fruit is long gone."
Also true, and oft-overlooked.
"Thiel is at least putting his money where his mouth is at Founders Fund, his venture capital firm making investments into robotics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology (alongside a lineup of dot-coms)."
Ironically, AI was jump-started by DOD dollars,[1] and biotechnology by NIH dollars. Robotics had substantial manufacturing implications and got money from that area, but has also benefited heavily from defense money (think UAV's, etc).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter#DARPA.27s_funding_cut...
[+] [-] nickpinkston|13 years ago|reply
However, there's a lot things where there's a ton of value-creation without enough capture. This is where collective action problems must be solved. This could be a consortia like an IEEE standard, gov't funding like the NSF, or something like a city. Many options, but none purely capitalist in the traditional sense of the word.
[+] [-] hencq|13 years ago|reply
> Only governments had the long view and available cash to fund things like supercolliders, deep space programs and - oh yeah - the development of the Internet.
[+] [-] crusso|13 years ago|reply
There's no question that the government has some successes to point to. I actually agree that government is decent at some basic research.
Then again, the private sector has had plenty of successes as well.
My main objection is that we don't really understand the opportunity cost of having the government spend the money vs letting the private economy do so itself - yet we let the government continue to make the decisions on what's fair.
[+] [-] return0|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pg|13 years ago|reply
Maybe we can do better here on HN. What's the right way to measure innovation? E.g. surely the 5 year old's definition (big shiny things that fly through the air are innovative, and invisible software isn't) is mistaken. But what would a good measure be?
[+] [-] jacoblyles|13 years ago|reply
When I moved out to Silicon Valley it was right before the Groupon IPO and hundreds of man-years were being spent on Groupon clones. Of course nobody remembers them now.
[+] [-] snowwrestler|13 years ago|reply
I like this definition because I think it accomodates the fact that a lot of products that are obviously inventive, fail to succeed in the marketplace or change many people's lives. Examples include Google Wave, the Apple Newton, etc. It also accomodates companies like Apple today, which do succeed in the marketplace and change many people's lives, despite inventing very few things themselves.
So when we look at the state of Silicon Valley today we can see that there are companies like Apple and Facebook that are innovative despite not being inventive. And then there are initiatives like Google's glasses and self-driving car that, while incredibly inventive, can't really be considered innovative (at least not yet).
[+] [-] larrys|13 years ago|reply
I think it's important to realize in answering that question a few things.
a) The answer to the question isn't digital (black and white) it's analog. It's a matter of degree and relative to the thing being considered. Curing cancer - say, up near 100. Cat photo app, say, down near 0. And everything in between. (Numbers arbitrary to make a point.)
b) Most people could probably have an easier time (like identifying porn) with what isn't innovation than defining what is innovation.
c) Daniel Markham's points regarding sometimes meaningless things lead to important things.
Lastly, none of this matters. If you are in high school it's a sure bet you will attract women and attention (at that age) as the high school quarterback even if you have average looks. People arguing that the system should change and the guy with glasses who will be a much better catch down the road won't get anyone anywhere. Things are the way they are for a reason.
I suspect that YC invests in the best situations they can find given a pool of applicants applying your patterns etc and knowledge of the past. Questions posed by this article (and some of the comments here) assume that markets operate together in collusion for the common good. They don't. If they did it would be relatively easy to get food companies to stop pushing valueless tasty food on the public as well.
[+] [-] akiselev|13 years ago|reply
By the very nature of innovation you can't define what it is just like you can't ever say for certain whether some abstract piece of pure mathematics will ever contribute to engineering or science (as it very often has). However, like mathematicians we can make educated guesses on what IS NOT relevant or innovative, and by extension will never be relevant or innovative. And of course we will be wrong some times.
The very fact that you think there is a "right way" to "measure" innovation makes me think this article is pretty spot on. Innovation isn't a business, it's not a product or a user base, it's not a stock ticker. More often than not, innovation is the result of thousands, if not millions, of man-hours of passionate and extremely intelligent people who care about their work and want to ACHIEVE something that is currently impossible, impractical, or even undesirable. You can't measure or predict this, all you can do is find those passionate, intelligent people (here's where the measurement part sort of comes in) and give them the resources and support to do something great.
The point of the article is that last part is not happening. There are so many passionate and intelligent people in the Valley but almost no one is giving them the chance to do something great.
[+] [-] timr|13 years ago|reply
You could probably also measure it in terms of essential inventions: we can't live without the internet, but if Instagram or Facebook went away tomorrow, we'd have lots of alternatives for sharing photos and talking to our friends. Instagram and Facebook make those things nicer, but don't allow us to do anything we weren't doing before. The internet (or, I guess, the web) allowed for entirely new forms of communication and commerce.
From my perspective, we haven't seen a new economy emerge in the last decade, at least. The internet (maybe molecular biology) was the last invention to really create a new industry, and that was the mid-90s. Maybe robotics is the next one, but it's hard to tell prospectively.
[+] [-] reasonattlm|13 years ago|reply
2) 10-year moving average of the duration of subsistence living expenses that can be funded from a fixed weight of gold.
Both of these are very high level measures that fold in a lot of underlying technological progress. (1) is weighted towards computation and biotech, (2) against mining and expansion into space (would have to be weighted somehow there to be useful much past the next 20 years), but both encompass far more than that.
Both incorporate advantages provided by fluff technologies such as networking tools, but so many levels removed that we don't have to stop arguing over whether they should be dropped in a well or not. This may or may not be a benefit from your point of view.
[+] [-] kentlyons|13 years ago|reply
Sustaining innovations are about making products in existing markets better and are further broken down into continuous innovation and discontinuous or radical innovations. The metrics here are about if the new innovation is improving performance within an existing market and by existing value metrics, and by how much. Continuous innovations are small improvements, radical innovations are large improvements.
Disruptive innovations are also broken down into two categories. There is the low end disruption whereby a product is competing in the same space as existing ones, but comes in from below. These are often cheaper and worse to start with, but then move up market as technology improves. There are many examples here (eg Arm coming in under x86). The other disruptive innovation is the new market innovation. In Christensen's terminology, these products compete against non-competition. There is a need, but no products fullfils that need until the disruption comes along. These products are tricky for several reasons. For one, there is no existing market and therefore traditional market research doesn't work. Instead, the execution plan needs to be focused on learning what the market is and what the customer needs are.
1] The series of books starting with the Innovator's Dilemma are a good read on innovation. The wikipedia article is a pretty good overview as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_innovation
[+] [-] zhangtwin|13 years ago|reply
http://www.cio.com/article/628054/How_Do_You_Measure_Innovat...
I want to call out how they discuss innovation: Ultimately, innovation is a means to an end — a competence for generating profitable growth opportunities and improving the organization's competitiveness. A holistic measurement system needs to have three perspectives: performance, strength of the competence, and strategic application of the competence. The performance perspectives report out the "returns" or "results" of an organization's innovation program(s) while the competence perspectives report out the ability to envision and implement innovative opportunities. The strategy perspective outlines the criticality and impact of innovation in the organization's strategic direction.
Hopefully we can get some good discussion going on this topic as in my day-to-day work, we frequently discuss with large enterprise customers how they handle change management. Frequently we discuss it in the context of IPM (innovation process management) and how to create organizations that benefit from managing innovation; and more broadly speaking, what types of software or tools they need to successfully handle this change.
[+] [-] jusben1369|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danielpal|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbesto|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamesaguilar|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graycat|13 years ago|reply
Pick a problem that needs solving. For the solution, use 'innovation'.
Then want the 'innovation' to be ideas, essentially applied research, that can be presented and evaluated usually just on paper. So, as in peer-reviewed published papers, the ideas should be "new, correct, and significant", and, for innovation in business, powerful and valuable for solving the problem. Moreover, we should be able to check these criteria mostly just on paper.
Then we measure the innovation by the ROI of the solution it provides.
Is that the only way to make money? No.
But this approach to innovation has one heck of a good track record for delivering terrific solutions for challenging problems via the US DoD since the start of WWII, and there the batting average is much higher than for information technology venture capital.
Moreover, and definitely should not be lost, and for 70 years has been understood with great clarity by both the US DoD and Congress, the real foundations of such innovation are pure and applied research as in our top two dozen or so US research universities (where about 60% of the annual budget comes from NSF and NIH for US national security and health care) with more in Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (the FFRDCs) and then more at Raytheon, United Technologies, GE, Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Hughes Electronics, etc. In total, Congress authorizes big bucks for all that work, and Congress 'gets it'. However, Silicon Valley wants to laugh at research and then turn and run away afraid of it.
US information technology (IT) venture capital has had a 'business model': Wait for 'traction' to be significant and growing rapidly but, still, for some reason or other, the company still not very profitable, and hope that then the founders will need money for the 'big build out', hiring bizdev and marketing people, setting up the sales force in the 'channels', etc. for the 'execution', or be so eager for "cash now" for 'the good life' that they will sign a bad business deal. Alas, as reported at AVC.COM recently, the ROI has been lower than an index fund.
Also there is an incongruity: A small information technology startup with traction significant and growing rapidly is in a much better position than millions of US Main Street entrepreneurs who make it without an expensive 'build-out' with bizdev, marketing, channel people, business expertise from former management consultants, etc.
For venture partners able to evaluate innovation, i.e., applied research, just on paper, YC is exceptionally good. Then there's Wegner at Union Square, Morgan at First Round, Metcalf at Polaris, Bayless at Sevin-Rosen, and a few more. There are, what, all together in all of the US, 20?
And then there is the list of venture partners who prefer to invest in college dropouts.
In college, at universities, at several laboratories, at GE, IBM, JHU/APL, and more, I have worked with many people good at doing and evaluating applied research. Alas in US venture capital, that list of 20 is about all I can find that is comparable.
With the ROI south of the index funds, it looks like there will be some changes that Darwin would understand.
[+] [-] fl3tch|13 years ago|reply
Get a PhD and do research. That's the real risk in life, that you might work your ass off for little pay, spend 30 years chasing a dream, and fail in the end.
But the people who succeed change the world.
Interestingly, most Nobel Prize winners donate a large percentage of their prize money to charity or research. They weren't interested in early retirement in the first place.
[+] [-] mgkimsal|13 years ago|reply
But if you drop the pretense, how will you continue to convince everyone that SV is the center of the tech universe and that everything worthwhile that happens must originate or migrate to those few square miles on the planet?
[+] [-] kmfrk|13 years ago|reply
Can't wait to read his upcoming book on the subject.
[+] [-] BummerCloud|13 years ago|reply
"We’ve encouraged managers to measure profitability based on a return on net assets, or return on capital employed. That encourages companies to liberate their capital, so they invest in efficiency innovations, which means they can make more money with fewer resources. But what the economy ultimately needs are empowering innovations—like the Model T, the transistor radio. Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years. So companies are using capital to create more capital, and consequently the world is awash in capital but the innovations we need to advance aren’t there."
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/02/mf-clayton-christensen...
[+] [-] pbreit|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csomar|13 years ago|reply
If BMW or Tesla design a futuristic looking key for a car, we call that innovation and cool. But a nice designed interface, is just another interface.
If some scientists burn a whole lot of money* to analyze DNA data, we call that innovation and science. However, when app ABC tries to connect people and do some social work, we call that another social app and a Facebook clone.
Please stop the hostility. Creating a new API library or writing code that does something new is indeed "Innovation". It's certainly not getting to the moon, but it's still a very little bit of innovation.
The new Internet enabled me, from a small third-world country to create a sizable income (at least comparing to my country per capita), learn a "LOT" and build a viable business.
Internet put aside, I have no chance of making even $1000/year in my country. That, and the fact that I started from exactly nothing (family computer) is for me this decade "miracle". The innovation in payments, digital products, advertising... have improved access to wealth and mobility.
I guess, the problem of the majority of people is access to wealth. There is too much wealth around (look at the majority of jobs, they are about moving wealth and not creating it e.g. doctors, lawyers, gov., traders, brokers, middle men...).
Access to wealth will improve the life of the average person more than accessing the moon. The Internet offers an unmatched opportunity to access wealth.
Please innovate in HTML, JavaScript and Servers.
* I'm not nitpicking on data scientists or any body, just to give an example.
[+] [-] jacoblyles|13 years ago|reply
If instead, your idea makes you say "That sounds hard. I'm going to have to overcome technical challenges/ accumulate domain expertise/ leap regulatory hurdles" then you are most likely breaking new ground, adding significant value to society, and creating something hard to copy.
As much as I am happy for the success of the snapchats of the world (and the army of snapchat clones), I don't think the world would miss them very much if they were gone.
[+] [-] kevinalexbrown|13 years ago|reply
I'm a "pasty scientist" paid by DARPA, in biotech. I work for someone who previously founded a brain-machine-interface company that had a small IPO (cyberkinetics). I would love nothing more than to see things I work on get turned into viable products. This seems to require two things: a) public investment in vague-but-cool-sounding-what-if projects, and b) easy ways to translate them into usable products.
For (a), someone should be funding things that might be valuable "platforms" for society: the human genome project, ARPANet, basic mathematics research (Fourier analysis, instrumental in many, many commercial products, was one such basic mathematical result for a long time). The value of these platforms may take a long time to pan out (if ever), so it makes sense to fund them as a society. Perhaps government per se isn't required - it could be done by some collection of nonprofits - but the funding won't come from many private firms. Further, if we want these platforms to be of use to many companies, perhaps they shouldn't come from private firms.
I think about it like I think about LAPACK. LAPACK is used by almost every scientific computing library for matrix multiplication. Now if Intel and AMD want to come along and make proprietary versions of it (e.g. Intel's Math Kernel Library), or if Matlab or Mathematica want to wrap them into an easy-to-use product, or someone needs it for a robot controller for a factory, that's awesome! The point is that there is some value in public research the market can draw on to make nice things (the ROI on LAPACK must be HUGE for whatever nominal cost + non-nominal man-hours it takes).
(b) is difficult, but there have been some efforts. One such is INVO[0], an effort at Northwestern that helps researchers develop their ideas without losing too much control in the process. They just founded cd2[1], the center for device development, that helps clinicians and engineers navigate the bureaucratic and regulatory hoops, and ultimately pitch. The key is that like YC, they have a strong network of people who understand this process, who to talk to, what you're really signing when you sign a piece of paper, etc. They pay you (for a year!) to work on your project.
My question (updated for clarity): What do potential founders of not-widget-startups want to be able to pursue the kind of innovation mentioned in the article? In particular, what would help translate academic proof-of-concept ideas into viable, fundable, products?
It would seem that asking VC's to fund cooler projects at the expense of profits is not the right way to go. Maybe a better strategy is to ease the link between cutting-edge research and consumer-facing products. What would help with that?
[0](http://invo.northwestern.edu/about) [1](http://cd2.northwestern.edu/)
[+] [-] philwelch|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] draggnar|13 years ago|reply
[0](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5348677)
[+] [-] redwood|13 years ago|reply
If you're asking how we can make the process better, doesn't it boil down to having investors who see the value of these ideas? You need to frame the business case to them in their lingo.
If they don't want to invest in you because they think the can make more money on BS web investments, then we're all losing. But ultimately there will be a shakeout in web investments...and then there will be a shift back.
[+] [-] calibraxis|13 years ago|reply
Just look at the first letter in DARPA. Those subsidizing your research are also customers you want. (The military.)
[+] [-] kkwok|13 years ago|reply
There are many areas where venture capital has not and is not well suited for various reasons, many of which you list. I think people's focus on consumer funding won't work because crowdfunding is even more driven by the allure of consumer facing products than VCs are. Foundations seem to me to be a good place for this.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] robomartin|13 years ago|reply
It is no secret that China shines for its lack of respect for intellectual property. The same is true for their willingness to steal just about anything from anyone and make it their own.
If we, as an open society, fund programs costing billions of dollars we would, in no uncertain terms, be "giving it away" to the Chinese and other bad world players.
It's the concept of unfairness when on person in a team does absolutely nothing yet benefits greatly from the work of the rest of the team members.
I know I am over-generalizing. Yet, I have to tell you, as an American citizen I despise the idea of investing my tax dollars in something and have it simply given away to other societies who have done nothing to contribute to the cause.
Would I like to invest tax dollars to find the cure for cancer and make it globally available? Absolutely.
Would I like to see the labs and companies we built as part of that process decimated and driven out of business because the Chinese take the work product we funded and drive costs so far down that our companies crumble under the pressure of our pricing models? Nope. Not interested.
Yes, society as a whole would benefit from cheap mass manufacturing of such a drug. And, while that happens, our industry will continue to be shredded by bad players such as China.
I don't have all the answers. I certainly don't know what the solution to this one might be.
[+] [-] a_p|13 years ago|reply
An interesting quote from an article[2] about an interview with Linus Torvalds in LWN.net:
"A member of the audience asked Linus to describe his single most memorable moment from the last 20 years. Linus responded that he didn't really have one; the kernel is the result of lots of small ideas contributed by lots of people over a long time. There has been no big "ah ha!" moment. He went on to describe a pet peeve of his with regard to the technology industry: there is a great deal of talk about "innovation" and "vision." People want to hear about the one big idea that changes the world, but that's not how the world works. It's not about visionary ideas; it's about lots of good ideas which do not seem world-changing at the time, but which turn out to be great after lots of sweat and work have been applied."
[1] http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html
[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/445687/
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|13 years ago|reply
Oh boy. We've got political commentary trying to pose as analysis.
Okay, let's get this straight: capitalism drives efficiencies in markets. Efficiencies drive innovation. If you look at this only in terms of money, you're missing the point.
So you have this huge bunch of people over many decades making things just a little better than before. Another person comes along and, now that many different pieces are much more efficient than before, connects them in new and innovative ways.
You don't have a Wright Brothers without machine tools, bicycle parts, and so on -- each of which was a tiny bit better than the thing before it. You don't have a Facebook without an internet, cheap bandwidth, and ubiquitous computing. Facebook wasn't "looking for quick gains while avoiding as much downside..", it was a more efficient way to keep up to date on important social information.
Yeah, every now and then somebody does this one thing that we all think of as grand. But nine times out of ten? It's only possible because the rest of the world of mankind has evolved. This is why we see so many people discover the same thing at the same time. They're not necessarily copying, it's just that we're ready for that discovery to take place.
This is also what is wrong with VCs (and some government organizations) trying to select what sorts of technologies need more attention: it doesn't work. It's backwards. Sure, you can have a goal that you then reward enough that somebody will reach it. But you can't decide on a solution and then keep dumping money on your solution until it works. "Winning WWII" was a goal the allies had that they were prepared to spend billions on. Because of 1) their resource pool in both money and talent, 2) the desire to have a goal reached instead of a technology deployed, it worked. If they had decided to "build a ray gun" no matter how much money they dropped, it would never be enough.
I'm not crazy about the day-to-day work of innovation, the guys making the better widgets, the folks making gears turn with less friction, the folks making farts come out of your iPhone. These aren't very sexy and nobody likes writing news pieces about them. But taken altogether, it's a million of these things that lead to the next cognitive jump in mankind.
If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished. So let's see $50 Billion to anybody who can take us to a repeatable $10/kilo to low earth orbit. Or $10 Billion for the first 3D printer able to print an electric car.
If you keep thinking of the problem backwards, in terms of capitalism vs. research, not only will you not be able to solve it, you'll actively and continually destroy resources that could be used in solving it.
[+] [-] timr|13 years ago|reply
Did you read anything else before you went into Political Strike Mode, or did you just skim it? From the previous section:
"most of Silicon Valley doesn't concern itself with aiming 'almost ridiculously high.' It concerns itself primarily with getting people to click on ads or buy slightly better gadgets than the ones they got last year....that's fine, that's capitalism - and these incremental improvements lead to slow productivity gains that at least quicken the pulse of economists. But maybe let's drop the pretense that we're curing cancer unless, you know, we're curing cancer."
The commentator has no problem with efficiency gains or capitalism. He's just saying that it's hypocritical to spend your life developing sheep-throwing software, while also complaining about how nobody aims for the stars anymore.
"If you want to see big changes, create big rewards for solutions without constraint to how they are accpomplished."
Right, like what the NIH and NSF do? Handing out money for research with no immediate commercial intent? Last I checked, that money (along with military spending) built the Valley. Government spending led to innovation.
You're looking for a political fight where none exists. Other than mentioning that Thiel tends to place the blame on the government (which he does), most of the essay is about the need for funding long-term research, not politics.
[+] [-] zevets|13 years ago|reply
Second, the notion that prizes can solve this problem is simply unreasonable. If a major goal (ie a cure for cancer) takes 20 years to develop, no organization can pursue the goal without intermediate funding. In order to provide intermediate funding with some semblance of accountability, you essentially create the existing R&D structure that exists in America today.
The other advantage to government funding is that with proper open access protocols, innovative ideas aren't trapped in the organizations that created them. There's no doubt that companies like SpaceX could have achieved what they have without the backbone of research done by NASA and published in NASA's amazing technical report series.
1. A nice article on the history of government support for the transistor industry. http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~business/bhcweb/publications...
[+] [-] qdog|13 years ago|reply
Arguably that's what government grants do or should do. Taking 50 billion dollars in tax money and stoking the fire in an area we are interested in WITHOUT THE EXPECTATION OF A MONETARY RETURN is the kind of thing the government can and does do. Of course, some of that 50 billion gets eaten by graft, and that's where the problem a lot of people have with government programs. Although private companies don't seem to have any better levels of control (usually much worse control) over corruption, a lot of people seem to think only 100% success demonstrates "working" government.
[+] [-] ErikAugust|13 years ago|reply
The Internet wasn't created as a result of anyone "driving efficiency in the market". Get real.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History
Also: do you think that perhaps it is wasteful for society's businesses to spend hundreds of billions on marketing and advertising differentiating products like soda, fast food and alcohol? Is that a good use of resources?
[+] [-] danmaz74|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoPiece|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnosis|13 years ago|reply
Of course, private industry is interested in funding research in to next to none of them (at least not nearly to the extent that it is in problems that have immediate profitable applications).
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_p...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_mathemati...
[+] [-] DaniFong|13 years ago|reply
These folks put their money where their mouth is, and helped out greatly when we needed advice or funding or connections.
Particular people who helped us out and are known to publicly call for and support big innovation include:
Vinod Khosla, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, Bruce Gibney, Patrick and John Collison, Michael Vassar, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Matthew Nordan, Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates
---
By contrast, most of the other VC firms, and all of the banks, were much less receptive and we did not get anywhere with them.
So I think people are at least trying to act consistent with their philosophy. Generally, these folks will try to support great groups doing potentially great things, if there is good chemistry. They can't do it all, of course. There are not that many of them. But they try!
I think more of the blame should be on entrepreneurs and scientists who can and want to work in these areas but choose not to, and instead go into the hot software field of choice, or worse, undifferentiated finance. They should be encouraged to make some attempt at making the difference in the world that they want to see. It is not someone else's duty.
If you can do something important, and you have the resources to make a good attempt, you should try, because you may be in a very unique position to do so, and it's incredibly thin on the ground in many important areas.
There are incredibly few companies genuinely trying to make energy storage economical. There's only one, that I can tell, that's trying to make reusable orbit class rockets. There are very few trying to redefine personal computing. There are very few going after cures for cancer, broadly. There are very few effectively trying to make solar economical. There are very few well managed plug-in auto companies. There are very few trying to provide clean, low cost, distributed water. The list goes on.
People working on these major problems keep bumping into each other socially. It does not take long. The population of such entrepreneurs and innovators feels like that of a small high school. This scares me, because there are many, many problems to solve, and many reasons not inherent to the problem or solution that any one company or effort could fail.
There should be more efforts, more ideas, more entrepreneurs, more competitors. That would make me much happier, and feel much safer. At the moment, it feels like if the wrong few people are depressed, sick, or distracted, major world problems are just not getting solved, and the world is set back by as many days.
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I would welcome any hard data to the contrary.
[+] [-] 31reasons|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buss|13 years ago|reply
Incidentally, if you'd like to actually turn terabytes of genomic data into actionable medical information, Counsyl is hiring software developers https://jobs.counsyl.com
[+] [-] shmerl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pastaking|13 years ago|reply
Personally I think web & mobile startups are getting easier to create so more people are becoming entrepreneurs to take advantage of that; the pie is getting bigger. I believe there are still plenty of "deep" tech innovators out there along with investors who believe in them.
Perhaps these "deep" tech innovators don't get much media coverage because they don't need it, therefore we don't usually hear about them.
[+] [-] Cardeck1|13 years ago|reply
And you can see here the difference between an idea-man and an innovator.Because in my opinion an idea-man can have good ideas and make some money out of them but an innovator will have brilliant ideas, passion to build something extraordinary, smart, without money being the first priority.His goal is to change the world.Now that is someone I would like to work with, not the typical I-have-an-idea-you-build-it-and-I-will-come-later-to-see-whatsup.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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