That may be true of industrial systems, but human systems bite back. If you devise a strategy for the stock market or the startup market to make more money that

That may be true of industrial systems, but human systems bite back. If you devise a strategy for the stock market or the startup market to make more money that anyone else, people who get wind of that strategy can (and will) devise a counter-strategy to eat your lunch. Innovation is not zero-sum, but if you create a monoculture of "what works", then what will almost certainly eventually work in the market is something different than the monoculture. An interesting analogy here is Feyerabend's take on creativity in science, "Against Method." Also, I strongly disagree that Google has figured out a process for innovation. Google does not have "one hit after another." They have a hit here and there in a sea of failure, just like Microsoft did. IBM, on the other hand, had one hit after another, until the market figured out how to "disrupt" them, and did. As an investor I've spent much of the last twenty years trying to figure out how to make a better risk-adjusted return. Either I'm a complete idiot, or it's not as easy as it sounds.