
America Lacks Meaningful Innovation - m311ton
http://greaterseas.com/2011/05/the-future-of-innovation/
======
jff
I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire
generation selling ads, making social media startups – slaves with white
collars. Internet hype has us chasing VCs and tweets, working jobs we hate so
we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No
purpose or place. We have no AI Winter. No Project MAC. Our great war is a
spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on
television to believe that one day we'd all be Zuckerbergs, and Bill Gateses,
and rock star programmers, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And
we're very, very pissed off.

~~~
SiVal
Oh, boo-hoo. You've also apparently been raised to believe that someone
(probably the government in some form) owed you the life of your dreams, and
as it dawns that you might have to work for a living, you assume your "rights"
are being violated, have a tantrum, and compose yet another leftist manifesto.

I suspect there is something wrong with how you were educated by "the system,"
but it's not what you think.

~~~
jff
Here I was thinking that everyone on the Internet had seen Fight Club, and you
go and prove me wrong.

~~~
sdave
(from India), This is the first movie i am going to watch now. Thanks jff.

------
lefstathiou
I think there is a bias in where the author, and a lot of the people who have
commented below, get their data points on innovation.

If you're routinely reading tech blogs and forums, the usual suspects will
appear and you'll naturally assume that the innovation taking place is all
web-app related and social media related. If you're reading scientific
journals on the other hand, you'll be overwhelmed with the amount of R&D
taking place in whatever field you're following. American corporations spend
hundreds of billions annually on R&D. These innovations show up in subtle
places most people take for granted. Just because you can't see it, or it's
not on TechCrunch, doesnt mean it isnt happening.

I would politely suggest that this author, and anyone that routinely reads the
same 7 tech blogs, subscribe to MIT Tech Review. It offers incredible insight
into more... "fundamental" (for lack of a better word) innovation (not to say
improving the way people communicate and access information is not
fundamentally innovative).

~~~
jimmyjazz14
I just subscribed to Tech Review, haven't received my first issue yet but I
have been reading the site a lot. Seems to feature a lot more interesting tech
news and information then most sites/magazines including Wired.

------
shadowsun7
I don't get this meme. Innovation can happen anywhere - and in fact it often
does regardless of how seemingly 'useless' the application is. Livejournal is
'boring', but out of it we got Memcached; Facebook is a 'PHP doodad' (actual
news article called it that, I kid you not!); out of it we got HipHop and
Cassandra and Thrift. Friendfeed is a 'frivolous social app', and out of it we
got Tornado.

 _“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click
ads. That sucks.”_ Sound true at face-value. But guess what? In order to
process the huge amounts of data necessary to 'make people click ads', we use
map/reduce, and we get and/or improve Hadoop. Both of which may then be used
for _other_ Big Data applications.

Sure, web applications _seem_ trivial. But the innovations created as an aside
to them very often are not.

~~~
david927
All of these are hacks. Interesting and useful, but hacks. None of these will
be around in ten years. It's not the kind of future-inspiring innovation the
author was referring to.

Web applications don't seem trivial -- they are trivial. Scaling them means
being creative, but don't confuse that with true innovation.

~~~
scott_s
I say this without irony: I think that Facebook changes everything. If
Facebook is not around in 10 years, then at least one social networking site
will be. People want to be able to easily communicate online with the people
they know in a global way. Facebook is becoming the global human database.

~~~
david927
You're right that a global database, partially about us and our relationships
(including a social network), is the future. Many are working on it, including
me. And Facebook has some seed data for that, but that's the extent of it.

We'll remember Facebook in ten years the way we remember MySpace now: We
don't. Facebook changes nothing.

~~~
scott_s
I can _see_ the changes Facebook has made in how people communicate right now.
This is not a prediction, I can observe it. I know people who no longer use
email and exclusively use Facebook for online communication. They share
vacation photos with their family and friend sthrough Facebook. They announce
life-changing events through Facebook. I, personally, have maintained
communication with people that normally I would have just stopped talking to.
These are not hypotheticals. These are real, actual changes in how I and
others communicate. Facebook has an order of magnitude more users than the
previous attempts - Friendster and MySpace - and is able to have much more
impact than them because of it.

If you're working in the same space as Facebook, you're not doing yourself any
favors by denying its impact. One, it harms your perspective, and two, it
harms your credibility.

------
awt
"The people that are using digital innovations to solve real world problems
like energy, health care, agriculture, and transportation are ahead of the
curve."

Those are all capital intensive. Most 20 year olds don't have that much
capital. It would be great to see more investment in this space, though.

I'm sure someone straight out of school could write software to improve
healthcare records management, but the cost of maneuvering through healthcare
regulations would be higher than most could afford.

My point is that people fresh out of school who want to be independent are
tackling the biggest problems they can on a budget of $1-2000/month.

~~~
nlawalker
Maybe that's the real lament then - that so many people fresh out of school
have such a strong desire to be independent that they don't contribute to
efforts to solve the problems you listed in your quote.

I'm not saying people aren't justified in wanting to not "work for the man".
I'm just saying that maybe the fact that working for the man is perceived as
such a bad thing (or _is_ such a bad thing) is a bit closer to a root cause of
America's problems than the idea that making people click ads is the best way
to make a buck today.

~~~
forgottenpaswrd
"working for the man"(in his 60s) is the fastest way to stop innovating fast.
They are earth grounded not "pie in the sky" reasonable people.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists
in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the
unreasonable man.” – George Bernard Shaw

Get a traditional job on your youth and wait to have a family to sustain and
not being able to take risks. That is the definition of killing innovation and
creativity. Kids are creative, middle age people are not. Kids can think out
of the box, adults are "inside the box".

~~~
ippisl
|Kids are creative, middle age people are not.

In most fields(except the web) , most serious entrepreneurs are around 40.

~~~
thorwed123
How dare you go against the Cannon of YC/TechCrunch Everyone who is 30+ is an
idiot. People are smartest when they are in High school and progressively
detoriate as they learn more

~~~
forensic
People are smartest when they're old, but they're also the most risk-averse
when they're old.

60 year olds today are generally uninterested in creating the future. Their
main concern is with their own health I find. The more active 60 year olds
also seem to love playing with real estate, buying/selling/renovating.

It's very hard to get them to invest in some future technology which will
change the world.

~~~
FrojoS
Exactly! Another very important reason, why the US _is_ THE innovator in the
world. Its the only industrial country with lots of young people.

------
taude
I don't agree with you, I went to the MIT 100K business plan awards the other
night and there were very few types of companies of what you talk about. I
think you're basing your assumptions on reading too many TechCrunch-ish
articles that focus on the consumer web-based marketplace.

For example, the winner of the MIT 100K contest develops sanitation devices
for third-world countries. Read more over here:
[http://bostinnovation.com/2011/05/11/sanergy-wins-
mit-100k-b...](http://bostinnovation.com/2011/05/11/sanergy-wins-
mit-100k-business-plan-competition-to-turn-shit-into-gold/)

I can think of tons of other examples, but don't have time to go list them
out. Just don't read a website like Techmeme or TechCrunch and think you're
really getting a total picture on the startup scene. I can tell you stores of
many of my friends working in high-tech ceramics and crystals, and new
recylcing technologies...

~~~
BenSS
Sounds like something I'd love to be hearing about since I started in Chem
myself. Is there a non-software tech news aggregator? Or even a blog by you
with interesting developments.

------
aantix
But isn't this just the natural flow of innovation? We solve trivial cases
first and then once the all of the idiosyncrasies of the technology have been
fleshed out, we proceed to more advanced use cases?

We had Geocities with animated butterflies and horribly designed Guestbooks
for others to exchange comments. Now we have Facebook that keeps people
connected in realtime regardless of geographic boundaries with a fairly
compelling user experience (relative to Geocities and that of 15 years ago).

I have faith in the current generation; trivial problems always become boring
so hopefully this pushes into a more meaningful considerations in our software
development.

------
msutherl
Wake up. "Web" is not the largest nor the most innovative startup scene. Bio-
tech, medical tech, and energy are all much larger. That's where the the
innovation happens. It just doesn't seem that way because they happen not to
be industries based on _diffusion of information_. Think about it.

------
dxbydt
If you want "fundamental" innovation, you simply aren't going to get it in a
jiffy.

Imagine if a person dead over a 100 years ago woke up today. What present day
technologies would he have no trouble recognizing ? 1.Movie Projector. 2.Bulb.
3.Car.

That's about it. We use pretty much the same 35mm format and film projector
that was originally invented some 110 years ago( George Lucas's constant
lament ). We drive around in cars powered by the internal combustion engine
invented a 100 years back. We come home to a dark house and turn on the bulb
invented a 100 years ago.

If you allow some leeway for time, you can add a few more "genuine"
innovations - Air Conditioning, Transistor/IntegratedCircuit,
Antennas/SW/MW/AM/FM, ...

The rest is just fluff. That's always going to be the case, unless you have
some major genetic mutation that'll cause all of us to wake up tomorrow & fly
away in our flying cars or jetpacks we rig up in the basement toolshed.

~~~
thorwed123
Drugs, Transpants, Chemotherapy, Vaccines, chemical fertilizers, nuclear
energy, internet, Wireless, Jet Engines, Petroleum Cracking, Plastics,
polymeric fibers, lasers .......

~~~
nod
1\. You are being rude. Don't write anything that you wouldn't say to
someone's face.

2\. I believe you completely misread the parent's point: that there are only a
few technologies that _are_ 100 years old. (Not sure what that means with
regards to the 'transformative' argument, but still...)

~~~
dxbydt
Thanks. The "only 3 innovations have lasted over 100 years" premise isn't
original. I first heard it at a graduation ceremony and it made a lasting
impact on me. Ofcourse the speaker was very charismatic & way more dramatic
than I am :)

But the phrase keeps popping up in several places. For instance, in
Hedgehogging, Barton Biggs goes to a pre-2000 tech conference where they
famously declare that technology innovations will propel the Dow to 20,000 in
1 year! Biggs calls bullshit & points out that genuine innovation like Air
Conditioning & steam engines are once-in-a-lifetime event. He is asked if the
internet is a "fundamental" innovation & he disagrees. He becomes a laughing
stock. The next year the Dow drops 2000 points.

~~~
shadowsun7
It pops up in Nicholas Nassem Taleb's works, too: "the technologies that run
the world today (like the Internet, the computer and the laser) are not used
in the way intended by those who invented them", and: "the three most
significant inventions of the past 100 years (...)"

------
cft
The products that are being developed by the new startups in the Silicon
Valley are gradually shifting from technology to entertainment, like
Hollywood. Google was still a productivity-tools oriented company, while
Facebook is mostly Hollywood style entertainment, a new TV if you wish. This
can be evidenced by the fact that Google is never blocked at work places,
while Facebook is almost always blocked as a productivity killer. The people
that this new TV show industry attracts are naturally different from the
people that the makers of productivity tools attract.

------
yakshaving
Not to make this a mutual admiration society, but I couldn't agree more. I
sent that BusinessWeek article to all of my friends that work for Google and
eff-book.

One of the problems is that doing innovative things is, by defacto, riskier. I
perceive that the general appetite for risk has decreased a lot for whatever
reason.

People are happier than ever hitting singles or doubles rather than opting for
the grand slam that really revolutionizes industries and... _solves_ the
goddam problem. It's been the hardest thing for me to hire smart/talented
people to join an awesome team with a bold vision alone when well capitalized
companies can provide safety, enticing salaries, back massages, free
food/beer.

One thing that I think could help are solving problems that are really
concrete and tangible -- Like putting a man on the moon. We need more of that
sort of drive in order for people to be inspired to swing for the fences.

------
mrshoe
It's pretty easy to disprove statements like "America Lacks Meaningful
Innovation" by counterexample. The iPhone. kiva.org. Tesla. SpaceX.

Something along the lines of "Much of America's so-called innovation is
meaningless" might be more accurate. But any environment that is sufficiently
conducive to innovation will produce a lot of meaningless innovation along
with the meaningful stuff. Innovation consists of a huge number of failed
experiments and a few successful ones.

~~~
chailatte
So you're saying that if people just keep making photo sharing apps (flickr,
facebook, color, instagram)....eventually those people will invent space
travel or nuclear fission?

~~~
dxbydt
Heh. That was quite funny, the way you put it.

Seriously though, the chap who figures out controlled nuclear fusion will
quite likely work out of a physics lab in a University both of which are
funded by the ad dollars I you & the rest of humanity spend on facebook.

------
enjayhsu
I don't really agree. It's more that innovation isn't publicized and talked
about as much as companies that are looking to score big. It also takes longer
to mold innovation into something that can be sold; in the end, we still need
to eat.

Also, why America? How is it different in other countries? Genuinely curious.

~~~
ikono
I don't think the author thinks it's better elsewhere. I assume he's American
and is just lamenting that this generation isn't living up to his standards. I
don't really know that it matters how much innovation there is or isn't. We
can always get better. I'd rather see this argument than the opposite.

------
Detrus
It would be great to have a comparison of fluff to meaningful innovation today
vs. decades ago. How many man hours were spent on silly military ventures?
Manned surveillance satellites, nuclear artillery, boomer subs, ICBMs, MIRV,
the Orion project etc. These particular projects led nowhere and had few
useful side effects. It would be interesting to add up the man hours and
compare it to the web economy.

Rhetoric is enjoyable to read, fun to write but in-depth analysis of our
economic and technological progress is a hard problem.

As far as the web goes, more can be done on it even before we resort to poorly
served enterprise/medicine/energy markets for new ideas. It's the same problem
desktop software once had when that market was over-saturated with word
processor or email client clones. It's only today that there are word
processors with new features, like the no-distraction theme. That could have
been done then, but there was a bad environment for new ideas.

Web people are chasing clone ideas because there's a bad environment for ideas
again. There's too much feature overlap between various social network and
communication tool attempts like conversate, qonversation, twitter, reddit, HN
etc. Focus on execution over ideas might matter more for your personal
success, but it's horrible for technological progress.

Also I don't expect the web culture of young hipsters and hackers getting
excited about enterprise/medicine/energy. Such markets could be served
indirectly, through some generic CMS/communication/portal/DB thing.

------
pnathan
Most serious innovation happens behind the scenes and out of the public's eye.
Among other reasons, most of the public (the laypeople) do not understand the
actual innovation concepts and technologies, so even if time was spent
marketing it, it'd still end up as...

internet = tubes

------
ksolanki
At the risk of unpopularity, let me be the devils advocate here.

Warning: I am going to support 41 M investment in Color and will point out
some odd issues with the way Ph.D./University research is funded.

What is the ideal environment for innovation? Give some hard problems to smart
people, give them enough time and money to solve them. At the end even if the
effort fails one learns what does not work. I feel that the people at Color
Inc. have this sort of freedom with a committed 41M funding. No? Do you think
all they will do with this freedom is just photo sharing? I doubt.

On the other hand, innovation gets stiffed by short term targets/pressures. It
gets stiffed when you need your research proposals to go through a large peer
review committee (at NIH or NSF). Why? Most innovative but unproven ideas are
killed right there. Feature prominent people as co-investigators or
consultants and your chance of funding greatly increases. Of course, this
system is still better than in many other countries, but there is some room
for improvement.

------
Mz
_While many of the best and brightest try their hand with media companies, the
bane of the American economy – health care – is begging for talent and
innovation._

"Health Care" and the medical industry are not the same thing and that's one
of the biggest mental blocks America has. I did the homemaker and full-time
mom thing for 2 decades and it allowed me to keep my son with cystic fibrosis
remarkably healthy in spite of not having a diagnosis until late in life.
Later we were both diagnosed. Because I did the full time mom thing for so
long and my idea of "health care" included things like cooking and cleaning
(instead of drugs and surgeries), I was able to get well after spending a year
at death's door.

I've got your health care talent and innovation right here:
<http://healthgazelle.com/> and it has nothing to do with the current medical
industry.

Now I just need to grow it, learn to write code and create a more information-
dense delivery mechanism (aka game).

------
jowiar
One question: What is meaning?

Making life longer? Making life better? Creating options? Creating
experiences?

I think everyone here can agree on the basic idea that some things have
meaning and some do not. Reaching consensus on what specifically has meaning,
though, is impossible.

Finally, is it that far fetched to posit that technologies developed and
refined to predict consumer desires or the financial markets can be
repositioned to predict weather, disease (both on a world-wide level and a
cellular level). That these predictions can be used to improve the quality of
people's lives, the availability of food, and otherwise? These techniques are
the byproduct of the current bubble, and targeting them at the physical world,
scaling them up (planetary) or down (molecular) will be the focus of the next
century.

Finally, in relation to my earlier point, 42... Discuss.

------
gmt2027
We are a generation of fluff and polish.

Today's most celebrated young 'engineer' is Mark Zuckerberg, creator of a
really cool way to rank hot chicks, measure faux popularity and extend the
social dyamics of high school into the real world. We make dramatically scored
movies about his trials and ultimate triumph and rank Facebook as the greatest
company to emerge in the last half-decade with a $50bn valuation.

Where is our Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla or
even Howard Hughes? Is it Steve Jobs and his charisma? What we consider
innovation has taken the form of the iPhone and the iPad, fancier toys in
polished packages with glaringly less functionality than is a technical
possibility today, conveniently dumbed-down so it is easier to keep us not
thinking too hard and, God-forbid, doing anything really imaginative.

Sure there is interesting work being done out there in green energy, space,
biotech and nanotechnology research. These were all conceivable decades ago.
We are unable to create good science fiction anymore because our imagination
is just as bad as it was in the 1800s. My God, they built driverless cars that
work, why isn't that game-changing Google spin-off the hot new company of the
decade? Does anyone even know the name of the former Stanford Professor whose
work could lower accident rates, eliminate traffic jams and parking problems,
make automobile ownership obsolete and drastically cut down emissions and
manufacturing waste? We could have a real transportation cloud that actually
does something useful other than being a repository for our videos and photos
that allows 'sharing with family and friends'.

We are complacent enough to only care about things that distract us from
actually being productive. Just about any system out there leaves huge room
for improvement. Everything is broken or needlessly inefficient: the
government, the legal, financial, energy, educational, healthcare,
transportation, and disaster management systems. Even the Internet is broken.
We should be building efficient sustainable systems that scale, not software.
Real innovation requires an iterate-or-die mindset.

I am an African. Don't even get me started on the developing world.

~~~
FrojoS
Helping to connect all humans on the planet is not important? This has been
said many time before and you don't have to agree with it, but imho Facebook
is a really important and revolutionary tool that has improved many lives
including my own. Sometimes the benefits where beyond my expectations.

I think, the reason why you see so much development in software, is because
its easy! I'm a mechanical engineer and still spend most of my time writing
code. Why? Because, all I need as PC! No staff, regulations, no material, no
manufacturing tools. This saves time and money and makes you independent and
fast. The entrance barrier is just very, very low, so as long as there is any
demand for innovation in software, there will be someone who will try to code.

I have this "to much software" feeling all the time, too. We definitely need
more innovation in hardware. Luckily, with innovations like 3D printers or
Polycaprolactone the entrance barrier for hardware is becoming lower, too.
However, in my experience, even these trends are largely fulled and based on
software. We are living in the Information Age.

~~~
gmt2027
Email already connects everyone on the Internet but billions of people are not
online by an accident of geography and birth. Mobile phones connect a
reasonable percentage of the rest. I may be mistaken but it is doubtful that
many users' quality of life would be dramatically affected by the sudden
demise of Facebook. It may be as bad as losing your favourite TV channel, but
life goes on. Facebook is a convenience that does not solve any of our real
problems or alleviate human drudgery in any way, It only increases the
enjoyment of existing wealth at idle time.

Incidentally, an explicit statement of what mankind's actual goals are and
what resources are being committed to solving them would go a long way to show
that we really all want the same things. Anyone that believes our interests
are best served by large corporations and governments at war is delusional.
These entities rely on the premise that success can only come at the expense
of the 'other guy'. In the grand scheme of things they are local optima that
promote the very scarcity that they have evolved to manage. Open Source
Software can teach something here, there are multiple distributions and
programs, each freely borrowing from the successes and avoiding the failures
of the other. The healthy but open competition between them means that we get
the best operating systems that no money can buy. Even OSS is not immune to
meaningless rivalries and sabotage.

The information age gives us new tools to approach the physical world which is
where ALL the real challenges still are, even in computing (think the end of
Moore's law, and the potential of quantum computing and communication). You
mention mechanical engineering, we should have amazing open-source mechanical
modelling software that realistically simulates the physical properties of
large systems, allowing you to design, build and test machines from a catalog
of reuseable components and subsystems in a virtual lab (Tesla did this in his
head), and send it out into the cloud for fabrication and delivery.

We all seem to agree that life is hard, why can't we approach it as an
engineering problem? I would like to see someone attempt to engineer a society
in a systematic scientific way. Evolutionary algorithms, game theory and a few
Petaflops of modelling power for the common objective function. No secrecy,
sentiment or ideology just let the best algorithms decide.

------
iamelgringo
Poppycock.

Health care's problems in the United States are not technical. Health Care's
problems are regulatory, and systemic. (My day job is in health care for the
last 20 years in 35 hospitals in 5 states.) Health care's problems in poor
countries are primarily due to a lack of hygine and clean water. Most of the
rest of their problems can be helped with decent tropical disease vaccine
research. That’s not an interest or willingness issue, that’s a funding and
economics issue.

There are massive amounts of funding for clean/green tech right now. Those
innovations are going to be hard, and come slowly, but we do have a lot of
brilliant minds working on those problems.

I dare say I have a front seat at the innovation table by hosting the largest
group of garage stage startups at Hackers & Founders Silicon Valley. I see a
lot of amazingly cool stuff months before it hits event the startup press.

Here's what I see:

Founders building social media startups are rare. Precious few founders think
about monetizing via ads, unless they are building a search engine. Funding
for ad based, or social media startups are hard to come by unless they show
tons of traction before funding.

The coolest apps I'm seeing built are hardware peripherals to mobile phones or
mobile devices: An ultrasound probe attached to an iPhone that can serve as a
fetal heart monitor. Motion tracking devices that can be attached to your head
and ankle so you can control a racing game on your iPad while excdcising on
your bike.

There’s a ton of innovation happening around the food space, creating new
markets for food producers and consumers.

There are also companies like Genomera.com, which is building a system for
crowd sourced clinical trials. Factual.com is building an open source model
around big data.

BioCurious is a very cool hacker space/community around DIY bio that’s getting
organized. As the costs of bio hacking come down, there’s going to be a ton of
innovation there.

There’s tons of innovation surrounding the Kinect. I talked with the CEO of
Health 2.0 a few weeks ago, and a Neurologist and a programmer got together at
one of their hackathons, and in a weekend, built a pediatric gait abnormality
monitor. Wait until the official SDK comes out, and drivers are included in
Windows 8, and you’re going to see some really cool things.

The very fabric and character of Silicon Valley is changing because of
innovation in how companies are funded (Angel List). Hundreds, and soon
thousands of two to four person startups are going to be funded. I believe
what’s going to happen is because of that, the rate of innovation in Silicon
Valley and around the globe is going to accelerate dramatically.

You complain that there's no innovation because everybody is just building
gadgets. Gadgets like cell phones are revolutionizing 3rd world economies, and
mobile payments via cell phones are creating truly disruptive innovation like
electronic banking and electronic money transfer. I visited my brother doing
economic development in Honduras, and most everyone carries a cell phone, even
if they live in a house with a dirt floor.

Have you looked at the innovations that are happening in robotics? My nephew
is studying at a community college in rural Minnesota right now, and he’s in a
robotics competition. He’s programming a robot that can crawl around and check
to see if a seedling tree is dead or not. If it’s dead, the robot pulls the
seedling. If not, it keeps driving.

Open your eyes. Stop reading Tech Crunch. Go to Maker Faire. Awesome things
are happening and you don’t even realize it.

And, if you're sick of the lack of innovation... then create something.
Complaining about it online does nothing.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
the elephant in the room for healthcare is and always has been that the
majority of healthcare is bullshit. or, in more technical terms, has no effect
on health outcomes.

~~~
aterimperator
Citation? Obviously healthcare works on some level, else life expectancy
wouldn't be going up.

~~~
pkteison
Really? You could make life expectancy go up in much of the world with nothing
more than clean water. But is that healthcare?

~~~
Goladus
Maybe, but you'd also be ignoring other basic staples of western healthcare
like vaccinations.

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2284/>

------
nkassis
The author mentions healthcare as an area of innovation but until something
happens to the massive regulation hurdles that are in place, healthcare is
hard to revolutionize. I'm working on a research project that could be used
for clinical stuff but it would be the process of going through FDA approval
for the software and all is a major deterrent.

------
Apocryphon
This article is geographically myopic. If you're in Palo Alto, you think that
all the smart kids are trying to make yet another Color. If you're in New
York, you think that all of the best STEM grads are trying to get into the
financial industry. Both viewpoints don't capture the big picture of "American
innovation."

------
dvse
There might be more to selling ads than initially meets the eye - the ability
to connect specialized products and services with interested audience can help
drive all sorts of innovation quite unrelated to social media. Many of these
projects may never take off without advances in targeted advertising.

Indeed better segmentation and the abiolity to get real time feedback could
bring about some rather fundamental changes to the very nature of the consumer
economy and the way demand is estimated and prices are set on a very broad
range of products - full consequences are not easy to appreciate.

------
tlow
Are the claims about 'top graduates' in 'top programs' flowing into startups
at a rate that is any different than in the past substantiated by fact?

This whole article reads to me like a statistician selecting and manipulating
certain data to _prove_ the desired result, except, there seems to be little
more than limited conjecture in this piece.

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Luyt
This article uses shadow fringes around the letters, which makes it hard to
read. Luckily, there is a Readability AddOn [1] for Firefox. I see myself more
and more using this handy AddOn... is 'designeritis' spoiling web usability?

[1] <https://www.readability.com/addons>

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fauigerzigerk
I'm very skeptical of all those marketing centered developments as well, but
throwing entertainment in that same bucket is nonsense.

Entertainment is an end in itself. Marketing is a means to an end without
(much) intrinsic value. These two things are as far apart as two economic
activities can ever be.

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tsotha
The problem is the political and legal environment is such that a company can
more profitably spend its capital in Washington trying to erect barriers to
competition than to actually do something new.

------
anand21
and i thought India lacks meaningful/() innovation

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thorwed123
The important point is that the startups doing meaningful innovation are not
founded by college and high school dropouts, but rather PhD students, or
Scientist or Consultants.

That is why the idiots such as Peter Thiel and others in Techcrunch/HN/YC who
stupidly argue that college education is worthless, should silenced.

Also an important point to note is that nearly all YC startups are also of the
same Crap Crop as mentioned in the article.

See I can blog by sending an email [and trash talk by competitors] how
innnnooovative!

------
mkramlich
The big perhaps too obvious criticism of the OA is that it's making a broad
generalization and is overlooking all the actual innovation and Big Ideas
going on. I for one am also sickened or at least unexcited by all the
unimaginative and incremental and "me too" startups and products out there.
But rather than just complaining about it, I'm doing something about it.
Innovation starts with you. If you want the world to be a certain way it's up
to you to help make it that way. Start small, think big, act today but aim for
the future.

~~~
KeithMajhor
I agree with most of what you said so I'm sorry to nitpick.

The distinction between "complaining" and "doing" doesn't make any sense to
me. The OA's intention is to change the way people innovate. This isn't
something he can be "doing" in his basement by himself. If he wants the world
to be a certain way he can't just _make_ it that way. At some point he's going
to have to persuade other people and "complaining" on the internet is a fine
place for it.

------
NY_USA_Hacker
The article is wildly wrong:

The Web? On the whole, it is wildly 'innovative'. Moreover, it is a huge aid
to economic productivity and, thus, standard of living and quality of life.

Search engines? On the whole, they are wildly innovative and productive
because they help solve a huge problem on the Internet -- finding stuff.

More in search engines? Yes, needed because the only search, discovery,
recommendation, curation engines that work well are the ones based on
keywords, and they work well for only about one-third of the content. How to
get a search engine that also works well for the other two-thirds? That needs
some 'innovation'!

A better search engine will likely have to make progress with how humans
understand 'information' and 'meaning', and that will need some 'innovation'.

The author views 'innovation' mostly just in terms of what happened in the
first half of the 20th century. Innovation is in different areas now. The
author is also missing that to support the new approaches to innovation, Intel
is now making 3D transistors with 22 nm feature sizes, and that in itself is
history-making innovation.

Ads? So far the Internet is heavily supported by ads. Why? Because it's
important to connect people with products and services. Why important? Because
a key part of a higher standard of living is having people better allocate
their limited resources, and key to this is getting people the information
they need for such better allocations. One way to get the information is to
have a person use a search engine to find the products and services. Another
way is to have a vendor of products and services use ads to find the people.
So far both ways are important.

The article wants to assume that ads are bad, and this is not good. There must
be something very important about ads since they support nearly all of TV,
radio, professional sports, just say, old media, and now the Internet. Pro
basketball players? Basically they are in the ad business.

One reason entrepreneurs are rushing to Web x.0 companies is that's where the
money is. And the money is not just in the US: The US companies that lead in
this work rapidly become successful internationally. It's foolish to say that
all this activity, internationally, is bad.

But not everything has to be international: The US did just fine, thank you,
from about 1850 to 1950 growing mostly just internally and with relatively
little role for foreign trade. So the claim in the article that there's
something wrong with the US selling to itself is wrong: The better standard of
living we want is from getting the work done, and we get it done by
specialization with one person selling to another. All this does better when
there is more efficiency, and the information via the Internet is a key here.

More information? Currently the US and more important world economies are in a
Great Recession. The core reason? Bad information. Thus much of the solution
will be better information. Generally information is just crucial for higher
standards of living. The best thing that's happened for information so far is
just the Internet.

Internet blogs are important, too: They can clear up misunderstandings caused
by confused people!

But for some of the innovation the author seems to be dreaming about, that's
coming: The foundation is Moore's law, the Internet, and infrastructure
software. Broadly the path to more economic productivity is to automate, that
is, have the machines do the work. Yes, we want the machines building houses
and cars, growing crops, tending livestock, manufacturing boxes, bottles, and
gadgets, making fiber, thread, cloth, and clothes, analyzing data needed for
progress, yes, including in medicine, etc. It's coming.

