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Sweden and Germany, for example, are heavily regulated but have more innovation in terms of GDP% than the USA. If you're talking about why we don't see more vi
by jashmatthews 6y ago
Sweden and Germany, for example, are heavily regulated but have more innovation in terms of GDP% than the USA.
If you're talking about why we don't see more visible commercial innovation from European countries then it's more about access to the enormous amounts of capital to build a big name startup like Uber etc.
Nobody notices the legions of small bootstrapped or seed to profitable software businesses across the EU.
- manigandham 6y agoHow do you measure "innovation in terms of GDP"? I certainly don't see trillion-dollar world-changing companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon coming from those regions. What small business could replicate the impact of Windows, or Gmail or the iPhone?
- haneefmubarak 6y ago(not the parent) I would think that since innovation and growth (caused by innovative use of resources or increase in efficiency or novel products and services) in general should be relative to the population and its state to begin with, nominal GDP growth per annum would be a reasonable metric as a proxy for the wildly non-measurable "innovation in terms of GDP"; for reference, here's the data for 2018: USA: 2.9% Canada: 1.9% Sweden: 2.2% Norway: 1.3% Finland: 1.7% Denmark: 2.4% Germany: 1.5% France: 1.7% Ireland: 8.2% (not a typo, likely explained by expansion of business services from NA into EU) UK: 1.4% Portugal: 2.4% Italy: 0.8% Greece: 1.9% Spain: 2.4%
- jashmatthews 6y agoNo need to approximate: https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm Germany is at 3.4% of GDP spending on R&D and the USA at 2.8% France is also right up there at 2.2%
- haneefmubarak 6y agoSpending on research and development is an awful proxy for results delivered by said R&D, which is what we would actually want to measure if we're looking for innovation relative to GDP.
- mrkstu 6y agoAlso highly dependent on the laws of the individual countries as to what counts as R&D spending.
- jashmatthews 6y agoLike the car? Volkswagen is twice the size of Microsoft by revenue. I'm going with the OECD definition here: https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm
- manigandham 6y agoThe car was invented in the 1800s, and has seen mature competitors in many other countries like Japan. In the current century, Tesla is the auto giant leaving behind all the legacy manufacturers while also branching into energy products. Pivotal products are a better milestone than vague estimates of R&D spending.
- TylerE 6y agoThat is a...wildly imaginative take. Tesla sales are a fraction of any of the big three in terms of sales or revenue. They sold 192,000 vehicles in the US in 2019. Each of the Big Three sold well over three million. Tesla currently loses $2500 on every vehicle they sell
- manigandham 6y agoThis thread is about innovation, not sales.
- disgruntledphd2 6y agoI mean, I get your point, but unless there are enough sales, pretty soon there will be no money for innovation.
- 2rsf 6y agoHow are Tesla more innovative than other companies ? They kicked off a big conceptual change but I don't see that they have a significant technological advantage over other companies like Volvo.
- bildung 6y agoIt's worth noting that those companies have trillion dollar stock valuation, but by far less actual revenue. Average revenue per year of these companies is "just" 159 billions. Amazon has had a revenue of 88 billion. German companies with more revenue than Amazon: Volkswagen, Daimler, BMW, Allianz, Siemens, Deutsche Telekom, Uniper, Bosch. On the smaller end, Germany also has a comparable number of employer firms per capita as the U.S. Empirically it largely is a myth that worker protection and consumer protection stiffles enterprises or innovation.
- manigandham 6y agoAmazon 2019 revenue is $280B, which is greater than every company you listed and tied with Volkswagen. Valuation reflects market sentiment and potential but perhaps I should have left it out. The real focus is the "world-changing" aspect of the products produced. What have been the recent global innovations produced by those German companies? Anything turned into a household name?
- jashmatthews 6y agoEvery Apple iPhone and Watch uses Bosch's gyroscope and accelerometer tech. They're also the market leader in smaller EV tech used in electric motorcycles, bikes and scooters. It all goes out to consumers without them knowing. Even Tesla use Bosch parts. That's why they're called a "hidden champion".
- manigandham 6y agoThe whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It's what you do with that internal tech that matters. We've had gyroscopes for a century. The iPhone is innovative because it used that to implement a new device that changed mobile computing.
- bildung 6y agoYou're correct regarding Amazon's revenue, I somehow got the 2014 data, sorry. I'm actually not quite sure what you mean with the "global innovations" part, though, could you expand on that? What is it that makes e.g. Microsoft innovative? What I see is the your big four all sell consumer product/ services and thus are more visible. E.G. Bosch is developing electric powertrain components, produces radar/lidar and video sensors for autonomous driving. Bosch also produces the robots used in those mostly-automated factories.
- ekianjo 6y agoHow do you measure innovation? American companies are on average far wealthier than companies in Europe and spend more in R&D as a result.