Through the first two paragraphs of this article, I thought it was going to be another silly rant bemoaning the lack of "real innovation" today. That is, anothe

Through the first two paragraphs of this article, I thought it was going to be another silly rant bemoaning the lack of "real innovation" today. That is, another riff on the "They promised us flying cars, we got 140 characters" kind of rant. One of the upsides of this job is that you get to see everything going on out there in the startup world. One of the downsides of this job is seeing just how many ideas out there aren’t all that original. Every week in my inbox, there is another no-code startup. Another fintech play for payments and credit cards and personal finance. Another remote work or online events startup. Another cannabis startup, another cryptocurrency, another analytics tool for some other function in the workplace (janitor productivity as a service!) But I'm glad I kept reading, because there is some good stuff here. I mean, it's not a PhD thesis or anything, but there's some insights worth pondering, tucked away in this article. The gist is here: Now, we are approaching a new barrier — ideas that require not just extreme depth in one field, but depth in two or sometimes even more fields simultaneously. Take synethtic biology and the future of pharmaceuticals. There is a popular and now well-funded thesis on crossing machine learning and biology/medicine together to create the next generation of pharma and clinical treatment. The datasets are there, the patients are ready to buy, and the old ways of discovering new candidates to treat diseases look positively ancient against a more deliberate and automated approach afforded by modern algorithms. Moving the needle even slightly here though requires enormous knowledge of two very hard and disparate fields. AI and bio are domains that get extremely complex extremely fast, and also where researchers and founders quickly reach the frontiers of knowledge. I would agree with that sentiment in the general sense. And there's probably some interesting things to be gained by thinking deeply about how to address that problem. The only part of this I found myself disagreeing with somewhat is here: We’ve gone through the generation of startups you can do as a dropout from high school or college, hacking a social network out of PHP scripts or assembling a computer out of parts at a local homebrew club. We’ve also gone through the startups that required a PhD in electrical engineering, or biology, or any of the other science and engineering fields that are the wellspring for innovation. While I agree that it's probably getting harder to come up with something really innovative without that "fusion" approach alluded to above, I'm not convinced that it's not possible. Furthermore, I don't see being "the next no code startup" or "the next cryptocurrency startup" as being a Bad Thing - so long as you do it in a way that's appreciably better than "the other folks" doing the same thing. Sure, inventing something Brand New is nice, but you can make money making a "nicer version of something that already exists", or by just innovating on business model while the product is unchanged (or mostly so).