Musings on innovation

Musings on innovation from Mark P. Mills:

It’s not that disruption (possibly the second most over-used tech word, after “awesome”) isn’t wired into Silicon Valley’s ecosystem. But foundational economic and social transformations don’t come from making products to compete with cab or power companies; they come from basic research that radically advances our understanding of—and thus derivatively, our ability to manipulate and literally engineer—nature’s underlying laws and materials. The apotheosis of such progress is the domain of the Nobel Prizes.

It is time for today’s tech giants to expand their vision in a way that would win a few Nobels. They need to step up, be bold, and make history by launching a major initiative to invest in basic science. This is a critical time. America has exhausted the extant model, dating back to World War II, for funding basic research. Our overall spending on basic research has been declining, a fact highlighted by the broad coalition of universities and researchers that has launched The Innovation Deficit project.

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