How do you measure innovation? Stating that the rate of innovation is dropping seems about as ambiguous as saying that morality is decaying. What the hell does

How do you measure innovation? Stating that the rate of innovation is dropping seems about as ambiguous as saying that morality is decaying. What the hell does it mean? The cost to performance ratio of computing is increasing at an exponential rate, e.g. the human genome project. We have DNA printing that likely is going the same way too. There is software for compiling DNA (Genome Compiler.) I find this both extraordinarily innovative as well as increasing in at an exponential rate. Humans like to copy each other. So, rock and roll in 1965 may have seemed wonderfully innovative. If you had listened to it from 1965 until 2013, it may not seem as much anymore. You've "heard it all." Perhaps the same could be said of network TV dramas. Some things appear to innovate in spurts. Take for example the Oculus Rift. Virtual reality headsets, for consumers, were stagnant since the mid 1990s. If you bought one in 2011 it would have been more or less the same as one you bought in 1996. Seems like a huge lack of innovation! Well, now we have the Oculus Rift. It turns out all of this development with mobile phones is directly useful for making virtual reality headsets fast, light, and high resolution. Who would have thought Angry Birds contributed to progress in virtual reality? I think we will see the same thing happen with other industries and products, where for 2 decades nothing interesting happened and then in a matter of months a company produces a game changer using advances in mobile technology, genetics, databases, etc. Now, perhaps someone who looks at the Oculus Rift says, that's not innovative, the concept existed 25 years ago. If that is how we are measuring innovation, it seems both shallow and dismissive of the incredible amounts of labor and creative genius involved. In 1953 Tintin went to the moon in a vertically landing rocket. I would be extremely embarrassed to call Elon Musk not innovative for having a working version of this rocket today. We measure things in such short time spans. Many of the things done have yet to manifest themselves as recognizable solutions for humans. If we look at human history in periods of hundreds of years or thousands of years, the amount of innovation we have seen over the past decade is phenomenal. Should the government be helping? Perhaps. Our larger concern should be innovation that doesn't do irreversible damage to the environment and consequently humans. Often government backed innovation is really about building very destructive weapons, which there is no private market for. If innovation is a little slower in exchange for not ending up with the next nuclear bomb, I won't be complaining.