7 ms·

American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation?

55 points by valhalla 11y ago

toomim 11y ago
This whole article is assuming that innovation comes from money, and specifically from the money labeled "R&D" in the budgets of nations and companies. Yet, most startups started on shoestrings. Then they got investment from VC firms. These sources of innovation don't come from NSF or Microsoft Research. And American innovation comes from far more than money. The culture of American innovation is a huge factor, which isn't declining at all.
- knieveltech 11y ago
  Trashing the margins of existing industries or providing a new interface for web-based technologies that have been around in one form or another since the early 90s is hardly innovation. You were saying something about startups?
- rocky1138 11y ago
  I totally agree that the American culture is a huge factor. It's as though this article has it backwards, that because there was money, there were risk takers. But I believe that the culture of willingness to risk is the driving force behind the money and the driving force behind much of that nation's successes. Fortune favours the bold. Secondarily, as public money from governments and money from large corporations dry up, innovation and risks are taken on by other parties. The article completely avoids crowdsourcing such as Kickstarter campaigns, an example of innovation being Oculus and their Rift. As the cost of innovating decreases, innovation decentralization increases.
  - L_Rahman 11y ago
    Funny you mention Oculus as an example of non-funding driven innovation: > In 2011, Luckey got a dream job working as a technician at the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). There, he had a chance to cross deep into VR territory. On Sept. 25, he posted the following on MTBS3D. [These excerpts are condensed and lightly edited.] He described the experience in a 1500-word narrative titled "Truly immersive (AKA "Holy crap this is real") VR simulation." via: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a12956/palmer-luckey-and-the-virtual-reality-resurrection-16834760/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a12956/pa...
    - rocky1138 11y ago
      That's really interesting! But do you believe Luckey would not have worked on VR if it were not for the job at MxR? I believe he would have, though it might have taken him longer or he may have taken a different path. The innovation stems from Luckey and the culture of risk and it's given a chance to flourish easier through funding than without. Besides, I was saying that other means have become available as the cost of innovating has been cut, sometimes by orders ot magnitude. Kickstarter, specifically, has replaced a lot of traditional public or large corporation outlets for funding.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  There are things that startups can address and there are things that they cannot. For little things that address a known or suspected market demand it is possible for a privately-operated business to develop new science. But when it comes to total blue sky research without any concept of a marketable product, and/or anything involving big science, then the private sector is not the ideal model.
- rifung 11y ago
  I don't think startups can really be considered innovative in the way that the article is talking about. Certainly startups can have very creative products, but in the end they almost always apply existing technology, whereas the article is more concerned with actually advancing science, engineering, or the arts. That's not to say that startups are unimportant, just that I don't think anyone would argue it makes sense to replace all research labs with startups. Startups are focused on making money, whereas research is focused with progress in human knowledge.
  - noobermin 11y ago
    Specifically, I think rifung is referring to the very high cost of fundamental research that startups don't have to incur, especially given the slow return on such investments.
- gohrt 11y ago
  Fun fact: Startups are absolutely R&D. D is for Development. Everyone who writes software is R&D as far as the IRS is concerned -- I have filled out the tax forms at my jobs.
- gaadd33 11y ago
  What startups have won Nobel Prizes for their innovation? Or contributed materially to our fundamental knowledge of science? I can't think of any but Bell Labs, IBM Research and similar have. If there are some out there it would be great to read about them.
paulpauper 11y ago
The iPhone in your pocket has more computing power than the Voyager spacecraft that left the solar system two years ago Sigh..people who use this example don't understand engineering. The Voyager doesn't need much power to do its job. An iPhone needs a lot of power to surf the web and play videos. An iphone also has more computing power than a Casio watch that you can buy a Walmart, because the watch doesn't need much power to merely display the time. It also has more computing power than a traffic light. As for R&D, another possibility is that universities and small companies may be compensating for R&D stagnation in bigger companies. Many bigger companies acquire small innovative firms instead of doing the research all themselves.
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  Your last point is addressed at the end of the article: > Rather than invest in their own science, big companies may now more easily buy innovative start-ups and develop their most promising discoveries into profitable technology. > And yet this ecosystem is vulnerable, reliant on a dwindling pot of public money that underwrites most university-based research. > “The buy-up strategy would be fine if we had confidence that the university system and start-ups were picking up the slack,” Professor Arora told me. “But we still don’t understand how this division of innovative labor would work.” > It might work. But it looks risky to put all our trust in that approach. It’s time for a different paradigm — more on that in a future column — to finance the innovation that will power America’s future.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  "An iphone also has more computing power than a Casio watch that you can buy a Walmart, because the watch doesn't need much power to merely display the time." Apple is fixing this problem right now. http://www.apple.com/watch/ http://www.apple.com/watch/
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  Voyager needed computational chops to do things like error correction and starfinding and etc, I suspect that NASA stuffed as much cpu in there as they could get away with, considering the whole 'radiation' thing.
w1ntermute 11y ago
Here's an article on a related topic, Beyond the Internet, Innovation Struggles: http://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-the-internet-innovation-struggles-1439401576 http://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-the-internet-innovation-s... Mirror, if you can't get past the paywall: https://www.notehub.org/2015/8/20/beyond-the-internet-innovation-struggles https://www.notehub.org/2015/8/20/beyond-the-internet-innova...
gjkood 11y ago
What about the people angle (as in People, Process, Technology)? I don't know how it used to be 20, 30 or 50 years ago, but if you have sat in a graduate science/technology/engineering course classroom in any US university in the last few years and surveyed the demographic profile of your fellow classmates you might notice something. The percentage of students of Asian ethnicity will probably outnumber all other groups combined. I admit this is only anecdotal. A fairly large percentage of those students (who are not already US citizens) will try to find work here and contribute to the US economy if they can. However due to the increasingly difficult immigration climate many of them will return home and become the spearhead of innovation for their home countries. I don't know if that is the same in the US undergraduate programs. In net, you have two factors here, 1. Fewer US based students are going into graduate STEM programs. 2. More US educated foreign STEM graduate students are being trained to contribute to your future competitors. I wonder what that does that to the long term prospects for home grown innovation in the US. Just citing one study [1] below. I am sure there are even more counter studies. [1] http://www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/2014/geography-of-foreign-students#/M10420 http://www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/2014/geograph...
- beloch 11y ago
  Here in Canada, the post 9/11 climate in the U.S. has sent a lot of top talent our way. In general, the international perception is that the U.S. is much more hostile to foreigners than it used to be, especially muslims. This is backed up by the fact that it's so difficult to stay in the U.S. after earning a degree there. If someone is good enough to grab a spot in a top U.S. university, why would you turn them away when they want to stay? The main thing holding Canada back is a similar increasing focus on "commercializable" research at the expense of basic science. Long-term commitment to excellence in basic science is what opens up new fields. Preferentially funding research with the latest buzz-words tends to make a country a follower of trends.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- munin 11y ago
  > Fewer US based students are going into graduate STEM programs Because if you're a US citizen, getting a PhD for the money is a racket. Just take your BS in CS over to Silicon Valley and start making bank working on Tinder for Dogs. Want to make six figures and have a shot at a billion dollars? The surest way to NOT do that is to go to grad school. If you're NOT a US citizen, getting a graduate degree is a great way to get into the US, do work that gets you noticed by big companies or labs, and then get a job at those companies or labs once you graduate. Many of those jobs will be in the US, and having a PhD will make your visa application smoother (so I hear) because you have an advanced degree. Foreign students have more to gain, so more apply. That's not hard. p.s. for the US overall, in 2013[1] 47% of the students enrolled in math & CS were permanent residents, so it seems unlikely that your statement "The percentage of students of Asian ethnicity will probably outnumber all other groups combined" is true. [1] http://cgsnet.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/GED_report_2013.pdf http://cgsnet.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/GED_report_2013.p...
WalterBright 11y ago
> Corporate executives, their compensation tied overwhelmingly to short-term gains in the market value of their companies, may be responding accordingly. I hear this all the time, and it's absurd. The high P/Es of innumerable companies (like Amazon) are compelling evidence that investors are well aware of the long game companies play and they approve of it. The charge that companies are eating their seed corn to satisfy wall street assumes that investors are monumentally stupid. Share prices are based on the collective best estimate of the future value of a company. Any hint that the company has sacrificed the long term for the short term will tank the stock value.
- hugh4 11y ago
  >I hear this all the time, and it's absurd. The high P/Es of innumerable companies (like Amazon) are compelling evidence that investors are well aware of the long game companies play and they approve of it. The sorts of people who invest in Amazon are, anyway. Still, it's true. Growth companies think long term. But the moment a company (or other organisation) gets into trouble it starts thinking short term. When you've got to lay off 20% of your workforce, you pick the ones whose absence won't be felt for many years. But really, the reason that companies don't invest in pure science is not that the value is too far in the future but that the value is too diffuse to capture.
  - WalterBright 11y ago
    I've seen what happens to companies that think short term. They think they're fooling the investors, and some of them manage it for a while (Enron). But when the investors do get wise, the stock tanks, every time. If you are better than other investors at knowing which companies are secretly eating their seed corn, you can make a fortune shorting their stocks. CEO compensation is often tied to short term stock values. But those short term stock values ARE a reflection of the long term prospects of those values, not last quarter's profit. I've seen a lot of share prices tank when a blowout profit was announced, because along with it investors got hints that there were big problems looming.
  - mtdewcmu 11y ago
    >> But really, the reason that companies don't invest in pure science is not that the value is too far in the future but that the value is too diffuse to capture. I think so. A lot of the research at Xerox PARC and Bell Labs failed to generate much profit for their parent companies, although it was of great benefit to society, so why should companies continue to operate that way? It's a market failure. The federal government probably needs to pick up the slack and fund more basic research.
sandworm101 11y ago
Funding for pure science is a function of american politics. The problem isn't in budgets or even politicians. The people with the money/power have lost respect for science. Some feel that scientists have an agenda, others that they are simply untrustworthy, and a large percentage see science as a challenge to belief systems. Those views are the real root. The desire to cut science funding does not come from rational deliberation. So the path to greater investment in science is not through rational debate. The only real path, and it is a long one, is to bring people on board through proper science education.
hyperion2010 11y ago
Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 is the single worst thing to happen to the American university system.
graycat 11y ago
US innovation? Okay, Intel is now at, what, 14, 10, 7 nm? Intel can put how many thousand cores in a single processor? There was the Human Genome Project and Craig Venter. The US did TCP/IP, IP and BGP routers, and the Internet. James Simons did a lot, he won't talk about, but that resulted in a lot of money. Can look at what is going on in fusion at Princeton, Argonne, Fermi, and LLNL. Can see what L. Breiman did in classification and regression trees and, then, random forests. Of course the USAF did GPS, which is accurate to one inch, and now farm tractors can plow very accurately due to GPS. The US has done well with carbon fiber materials. But, IMHO, relatively well informed, is that the US has powerful, valuable innovation coming like drips of a leaky faucet when it should be raging like a massive, wild river. Why the difference? The people managing the money don't have even as much as a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue about how to do innovative projects successfully. As soon as they see something beyond what they knew in middle school, they roll their eyes, throw up their arms, scream about blue sky, intellectual fun, games, and self-abuse, etc. That's grotesque incompetence. The main exception is the innovation for US national security. A second exception is medical innovation, especially funded by the NIH and the research hospitals. Silicon Valley? It has history majors with LLBs and/or MBAs who are 99 44/100% non technical looking for routine software for yet another social, mobile, sharing, membership, consumer thingy, throwing their line into their backyard above ground pool hoping to hook another Facebook. We're talking totally clueless. Hopeless. Their ability to identify, formulate, evaluate, and pursue powerful, valuable technical innovation? Zip, zilch, or zero. Their technical competence? Even worse. Did I mention hopeless? Instead, just got to have people running projects and allocating funds who actually understand how to innovate. E.g., need an Andrew Viterbi, Gordon Moore, Craig Venter, James Simons. For Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, go back to Harvard, complete a good education, and then try to allocate some funds effectively. Page/Brin -- back to Stanford, guys. I've seen a lot in innovation, and what I've seen in the decision makers in Silicon Valley is the lowest, lower than I would ever have suspected could exist. And their ROI? Actually, on average, poor. Blunt fact: Could hold a convention in a commercial airplane wash room of all the Silicon Valley venture partners and CEOs qualified for a problem sponsor position at NSF. Sorry 'bout that. We're talking business development people? Marketing guys? Hold on while I go for a big swig of the pink stuff, Pepto Bismol. Darn, too late -- upchucked, on the sheared 100% wool carpet. Those people believe that the crucial core of the innovation they are looking for is some C++ code on Linux done by self-taught hackers. At least when the US DoE and NSF fund fusion research, they don't look for really big breakthroughs from 10 year old naughty boys out back playing with matches. In the past there has been innovation, also, when there was money enough involved and people ready to do something: E.g., clocks. Why? Well, in 1800 a wooden ship good for open ocean sailing was big time expensive. But on a successful voyage, such a ship could make a lot of money. But, the ship needed to know its longitude -- latitude was much easier. For longitude, ..., right, need a really accurate clock. Newton knew that, too. So, at whatever effort, ships got some quite accurate clocks. Else the ships too often ended up on the rocks. Innovation can be done; it has been done; here in the US now we should have a raging, wild river of innovation; instead, we have a drip, drip. Net, the people running and funding the projects are technically incompetent. E.g., they just didn't study the right stuff, long enough, hard enough in school, and, gotta tell you, now, away from graduate school, no way will they reinvent that material.
xname 11y ago
It is also absurd to insist more investment in baisc science. Modern physics has too much to be consumed in applied science.
ebt 11y ago
What's with the ? in the HN title.
rdlecler1 11y ago
It would be awesome if HACKERnews could see a NYT article and link to the Google search redirect. I hope that's not too much of a technical challenge given the name...
sailfast 11y ago
This article has me extremely confused. They keep talking about a dearth of R&D spending relative to the rest of the world and then present a graph that says we are basically keeping up and have been at about the same level compared to most countries since 1995. Am I missing something here? Is the lack of funding rickety? That all of it is moving into the "D" rather than the "R"? Is there a distinction, or are we just "feeling" like laggards without a good key metric to represent it?
JesperRavn 11y ago
American corporate labs are the stuff of legend. Researchers dream of the halcyon days of Bell Labs and its eight Nobel Prize winners, who brought us the transistor and Unix. Others reminisce about Xerox PARC, which came up with the graphical user interface that propelled the personal computer into just about every home and office. Those days are long gone... What about commodity clusters (i.e. all cloud computing), MapReduce/Hadoop, Spark, or the deep learning renaissance? Yes, I am super biased, but I think Google and Facebook have done as much to advance technology as their predecessors. But apart from that they have a point. Raw numbers matter, and even though R&D might have a fuzzy boundary with ordinary business, I think that R&D expenditure is a useful signal.
anjc 11y ago
This article seems to be ignoring a new dynamic, in my eyes, which is that of "outsourcing" innovation to third level institutions, and the facilitation of commercial innovation by third level institutes, for industry. It has the effect of shifting innovation from being a fixed costed cost-centre, to being a variable cost with more potential for profit. As we can see from Uber's announcement that they want to buy university robotics departments, innovation can be reincorporated if it has a potential return. It's definitely a change in the innovation landscape.

55 points by valhalla 11y ago

This whole article is assuming that innovation comes from money, and specifically from the money labeled "R&D" in the budgets of nations and companies. Yet, most startups started on shoestrings. Then they got investment from VC firms. These sources of innovation don't come from NSF or Microsoft Research. And American innovation comes from far more than money. The culture of American innovation is a huge factor, which isn't declining at all.

knieveltech 11y ago
Trashing the margins of existing industries or providing a new interface for web-based technologies that have been around in one form or another since the early 90s is hardly innovation. You were saying something about startups?
rocky1138 11y ago
I totally agree that the American culture is a huge factor. It's as though this article has it backwards, that because there was money, there were risk takers. But I believe that the culture of willingness to risk is the driving force behind the money and the driving force behind much of that nation's successes. Fortune favours the bold. Secondarily, as public money from governments and money from large corporations dry up, innovation and risks are taken on by other parties. The article completely avoids crowdsourcing such as Kickstarter campaigns, an example of innovation being Oculus and their Rift. As the cost of innovating decreases, innovation decentralization increases.
- L_Rahman 11y ago
  Funny you mention Oculus as an example of non-funding driven innovation: > In 2011, Luckey got a dream job working as a technician at the Mixed Reality Lab (MxR) at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT). There, he had a chance to cross deep into VR territory. On Sept. 25, he posted the following on MTBS3D. [These excerpts are condensed and lightly edited.] He described the experience in a 1500-word narrative titled "Truly immersive (AKA "Holy crap this is real") VR simulation." via: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a12956/palmer-luckey-and-the-virtual-reality-resurrection-16834760/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a12956/pa...
  - rocky1138 11y ago
    That's really interesting! But do you believe Luckey would not have worked on VR if it were not for the job at MxR? I believe he would have, though it might have taken him longer or he may have taken a different path. The innovation stems from Luckey and the culture of risk and it's given a chance to flourish easier through funding than without. Besides, I was saying that other means have become available as the cost of innovating has been cut, sometimes by orders ot magnitude. Kickstarter, specifically, has replaced a lot of traditional public or large corporation outlets for funding.
sandworm101 11y ago
There are things that startups can address and there are things that they cannot. For little things that address a known or suspected market demand it is possible for a privately-operated business to develop new science. But when it comes to total blue sky research without any concept of a marketable product, and/or anything involving big science, then the private sector is not the ideal model.
rifung 11y ago
I don't think startups can really be considered innovative in the way that the article is talking about. Certainly startups can have very creative products, but in the end they almost always apply existing technology, whereas the article is more concerned with actually advancing science, engineering, or the arts. That's not to say that startups are unimportant, just that I don't think anyone would argue it makes sense to replace all research labs with startups. Startups are focused on making money, whereas research is focused with progress in human knowledge.
- noobermin 11y ago
  Specifically, I think rifung is referring to the very high cost of fundamental research that startups don't have to incur, especially given the slow return on such investments.
gohrt 11y ago
Fun fact: Startups are absolutely R&D. D is for Development. Everyone who writes software is R&D as far as the IRS is concerned -- I have filled out the tax forms at my jobs.
gaadd33 11y ago
What startups have won Nobel Prizes for their innovation? Or contributed materially to our fundamental knowledge of science? I can't think of any but Bell Labs, IBM Research and similar have. If there are some out there it would be great to read about them.

paulpauper 11y ago

The iPhone in your pocket has more computing power than the Voyager spacecraft that left the solar system two years ago Sigh..people who use this example don't understand engineering. The Voyager doesn't need much power to do its job. An iPhone needs a lot of power to surf the web and play videos. An iphone also has more computing power than a Casio watch that you can buy a Walmart, because the watch doesn't need much power to merely display the time. It also has more computing power than a traffic light. As for R&D, another possibility is that universities and small companies may be compensating for R&D stagnation in bigger companies. Many bigger companies acquire small innovative firms instead of doing the research all themselves.

w1ntermute 11y ago
Your last point is addressed at the end of the article: > Rather than invest in their own science, big companies may now more easily buy innovative start-ups and develop their most promising discoveries into profitable technology. > And yet this ecosystem is vulnerable, reliant on a dwindling pot of public money that underwrites most university-based research. > “The buy-up strategy would be fine if we had confidence that the university system and start-ups were picking up the slack,” Professor Arora told me. “But we still don’t understand how this division of innovative labor would work.” > It might work. But it looks risky to put all our trust in that approach. It’s time for a different paradigm — more on that in a future column — to finance the innovation that will power America’s future.
nostrademons 11y ago
"An iphone also has more computing power than a Casio watch that you can buy a Walmart, because the watch doesn't need much power to merely display the time." Apple is fixing this problem right now. http://www.apple.com/watch/ http://www.apple.com/watch/
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
Voyager needed computational chops to do things like error correction and starfinding and etc, I suspect that NASA stuffed as much cpu in there as they could get away with, considering the whole 'radiation' thing.

w1ntermute 11y ago

Here's an article on a related topic, Beyond the Internet, Innovation Struggles: http://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-the-internet-innovation-struggles-1439401576 http://www.wsj.com/articles/beyond-the-internet-innovation-s... Mirror, if you can't get past the paywall: https://www.notehub.org/2015/8/20/beyond-the-internet-innovation-struggles https://www.notehub.org/2015/8/20/beyond-the-internet-innova...

gjkood 11y ago

What about the people angle (as in People, Process, Technology)? I don't know how it used to be 20, 30 or 50 years ago, but if you have sat in a graduate science/technology/engineering course classroom in any US university in the last few years and surveyed the demographic profile of your fellow classmates you might notice something. The percentage of students of Asian ethnicity will probably outnumber all other groups combined. I admit this is only anecdotal. A fairly large percentage of those students (who are not already US citizens) will try to find work here and contribute to the US economy if they can. However due to the increasingly difficult immigration climate many of them will return home and become the spearhead of innovation for their home countries. I don't know if that is the same in the US undergraduate programs. In net, you have two factors here, 1. Fewer US based students are going into graduate STEM programs. 2. More US educated foreign STEM graduate students are being trained to contribute to your future competitors. I wonder what that does that to the long term prospects for home grown innovation in the US. Just citing one study [1] below. I am sure there are even more counter studies. [1] http://www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/2014/geography-of-foreign-students#/M10420 http://www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/2014/geograph...

beloch 11y ago
Here in Canada, the post 9/11 climate in the U.S. has sent a lot of top talent our way. In general, the international perception is that the U.S. is much more hostile to foreigners than it used to be, especially muslims. This is backed up by the fact that it's so difficult to stay in the U.S. after earning a degree there. If someone is good enough to grab a spot in a top U.S. university, why would you turn them away when they want to stay? The main thing holding Canada back is a similar increasing focus on "commercializable" research at the expense of basic science. Long-term commitment to excellence in basic science is what opens up new fields. Preferentially funding research with the latest buzz-words tends to make a country a follower of trends.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
munin 11y ago
> Fewer US based students are going into graduate STEM programs Because if you're a US citizen, getting a PhD for the money is a racket. Just take your BS in CS over to Silicon Valley and start making bank working on Tinder for Dogs. Want to make six figures and have a shot at a billion dollars? The surest way to NOT do that is to go to grad school. If you're NOT a US citizen, getting a graduate degree is a great way to get into the US, do work that gets you noticed by big companies or labs, and then get a job at those companies or labs once you graduate. Many of those jobs will be in the US, and having a PhD will make your visa application smoother (so I hear) because you have an advanced degree. Foreign students have more to gain, so more apply. That's not hard. p.s. for the US overall, in 2013[1] 47% of the students enrolled in math & CS were permanent residents, so it seems unlikely that your statement "The percentage of students of Asian ethnicity will probably outnumber all other groups combined" is true. [1] http://cgsnet.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/GED_report_2013.pdf http://cgsnet.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/GED_report_2013.p...

WalterBright 11y ago

> Corporate executives, their compensation tied overwhelmingly to short-term gains in the market value of their companies, may be responding accordingly. I hear this all the time, and it's absurd. The high P/Es of innumerable companies (like Amazon) are compelling evidence that investors are well aware of the long game companies play and they approve of it. The charge that companies are eating their seed corn to satisfy wall street assumes that investors are monumentally stupid. Share prices are based on the collective best estimate of the future value of a company. Any hint that the company has sacrificed the long term for the short term will tank the stock value.

hugh4 11y ago
>I hear this all the time, and it's absurd. The high P/Es of innumerable companies (like Amazon) are compelling evidence that investors are well aware of the long game companies play and they approve of it. The sorts of people who invest in Amazon are, anyway. Still, it's true. Growth companies think long term. But the moment a company (or other organisation) gets into trouble it starts thinking short term. When you've got to lay off 20% of your workforce, you pick the ones whose absence won't be felt for many years. But really, the reason that companies don't invest in pure science is not that the value is too far in the future but that the value is too diffuse to capture.
- WalterBright 11y ago
  I've seen what happens to companies that think short term. They think they're fooling the investors, and some of them manage it for a while (Enron). But when the investors do get wise, the stock tanks, every time. If you are better than other investors at knowing which companies are secretly eating their seed corn, you can make a fortune shorting their stocks. CEO compensation is often tied to short term stock values. But those short term stock values ARE a reflection of the long term prospects of those values, not last quarter's profit. I've seen a lot of share prices tank when a blowout profit was announced, because along with it investors got hints that there were big problems looming.
- mtdewcmu 11y ago
  >> But really, the reason that companies don't invest in pure science is not that the value is too far in the future but that the value is too diffuse to capture. I think so. A lot of the research at Xerox PARC and Bell Labs failed to generate much profit for their parent companies, although it was of great benefit to society, so why should companies continue to operate that way? It's a market failure. The federal government probably needs to pick up the slack and fund more basic research.

sandworm101 11y ago

Funding for pure science is a function of american politics. The problem isn't in budgets or even politicians. The people with the money/power have lost respect for science. Some feel that scientists have an agenda, others that they are simply untrustworthy, and a large percentage see science as a challenge to belief systems. Those views are the real root. The desire to cut science funding does not come from rational deliberation. So the path to greater investment in science is not through rational debate. The only real path, and it is a long one, is to bring people on board through proper science education.

hyperion2010 11y ago

Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 is the single worst thing to happen to the American university system.

graycat 11y ago

US innovation? Okay, Intel is now at, what, 14, 10, 7 nm? Intel can put how many thousand cores in a single processor? There was the Human Genome Project and Craig Venter. The US did TCP/IP, IP and BGP routers, and the Internet. James Simons did a lot, he won't talk about, but that resulted in a lot of money. Can look at what is going on in fusion at Princeton, Argonne, Fermi, and LLNL. Can see what L. Breiman did in classification and regression trees and, then, random forests. Of course the USAF did GPS, which is accurate to one inch, and now farm tractors can plow very accurately due to GPS. The US has done well with carbon fiber materials. But, IMHO, relatively well informed, is that the US has powerful, valuable innovation coming like drips of a leaky faucet when it should be raging like a massive, wild river. Why the difference? The people managing the money don't have even as much as a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue about how to do innovative projects successfully. As soon as they see something beyond what they knew in middle school, they roll their eyes, throw up their arms, scream about blue sky, intellectual fun, games, and self-abuse, etc. That's grotesque incompetence. The main exception is the innovation for US national security. A second exception is medical innovation, especially funded by the NIH and the research hospitals. Silicon Valley? It has history majors with LLBs and/or MBAs who are 99 44/100% non technical looking for routine software for yet another social, mobile, sharing, membership, consumer thingy, throwing their line into their backyard above ground pool hoping to hook another Facebook. We're talking totally clueless. Hopeless. Their ability to identify, formulate, evaluate, and pursue powerful, valuable technical innovation? Zip, zilch, or zero. Their technical competence? Even worse. Did I mention hopeless? Instead, just got to have people running projects and allocating funds who actually understand how to innovate. E.g., need an Andrew Viterbi, Gordon Moore, Craig Venter, James Simons. For Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, go back to Harvard, complete a good education, and then try to allocate some funds effectively. Page/Brin -- back to Stanford, guys. I've seen a lot in innovation, and what I've seen in the decision makers in Silicon Valley is the lowest, lower than I would ever have suspected could exist. And their ROI? Actually, on average, poor. Blunt fact: Could hold a convention in a commercial airplane wash room of all the Silicon Valley venture partners and CEOs qualified for a problem sponsor position at NSF. Sorry 'bout that. We're talking business development people? Marketing guys? Hold on while I go for a big swig of the pink stuff, Pepto Bismol. Darn, too late -- upchucked, on the sheared 100% wool carpet. Those people believe that the crucial core of the innovation they are looking for is some C++ code on Linux done by self-taught hackers. At least when the US DoE and NSF fund fusion research, they don't look for really big breakthroughs from 10 year old naughty boys out back playing with matches. In the past there has been innovation, also, when there was money enough involved and people ready to do something: E.g., clocks. Why? Well, in 1800 a wooden ship good for open ocean sailing was big time expensive. But on a successful voyage, such a ship could make a lot of money. But, the ship needed to know its longitude -- latitude was much easier. For longitude, ..., right, need a really accurate clock. Newton knew that, too. So, at whatever effort, ships got some quite accurate clocks. Else the ships too often ended up on the rocks. Innovation can be done; it has been done; here in the US now we should have a raging, wild river of innovation; instead, we have a drip, drip. Net, the people running and funding the projects are technically incompetent. E.g., they just didn't study the right stuff, long enough, hard enough in school, and, gotta tell you, now, away from graduate school, no way will they reinvent that material.

xname 11y ago

It is also absurd to insist more investment in baisc science. Modern physics has too much to be consumed in applied science.

ebt 11y ago

What's with the ? in the HN title.

rdlecler1 11y ago

It would be awesome if HACKERnews could see a NYT article and link to the Google search redirect. I hope that's not too much of a technical challenge given the name...

sailfast 11y ago

This article has me extremely confused. They keep talking about a dearth of R&D spending relative to the rest of the world and then present a graph that says we are basically keeping up and have been at about the same level compared to most countries since 1995. Am I missing something here? Is the lack of funding rickety? That all of it is moving into the "D" rather than the "R"? Is there a distinction, or are we just "feeling" like laggards without a good key metric to represent it?

JesperRavn 11y ago

American corporate labs are the stuff of legend. Researchers dream of the halcyon days of Bell Labs and its eight Nobel Prize winners, who brought us the transistor and Unix. Others reminisce about Xerox PARC, which came up with the graphical user interface that propelled the personal computer into just about every home and office. Those days are long gone... What about commodity clusters (i.e. all cloud computing), MapReduce/Hadoop, Spark, or the deep learning renaissance? Yes, I am super biased, but I think Google and Facebook have done as much to advance technology as their predecessors. But apart from that they have a point. Raw numbers matter, and even though R&D might have a fuzzy boundary with ordinary business, I think that R&D expenditure is a useful signal.

anjc 11y ago

This article seems to be ignoring a new dynamic, in my eyes, which is that of "outsourcing" innovation to third level institutions, and the facilitation of commercial innovation by third level institutes, for industry. It has the effect of shifting innovation from being a fixed costed cost-centre, to being a variable cost with more potential for profit. As we can see from Uber's announcement that they want to buy university robotics departments, innovation can be reincorporated if it has a potential return. It's definitely a change in the innovation landscape.