American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation?

What about the people angle (as in People, Process, Technology)?<p>I don&#x27;t know how it used to be 20, 30 or 50 years ago, but if you have sat in a graduate science&#x2F;technology&#x2F;engineering course classroom in any US university in the last few years and surveyed the demographic profile of your fellow classmates you might notice something.<p>The percentage of students of Asian ethnicity will probably outnumber all other groups combined. I admit this is only anecdotal.<p>A fairly large percentage of those students (who are not already US citizens) will try to find work here and contribute to the US economy if they can. However due to the increasingly difficult immigration climate many of them will return home and become the spearhead of innovation for their home countries.<p>I don&#x27;t know if that is the same in the US undergraduate programs.<p>In net, you have two factors here, 1. Fewer US based students are going into graduate STEM programs. 2. More US educated foreign STEM graduate students are being trained to contribute to your future competitors.<p>I wonder what that does that to the long term prospects for home grown innovation in the US.<p>Just citing one study [1] below. I am sure there are even more counter studies.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;research&#x2F;interactives&#x2F;2014&#x2F;geography-of-foreign-students#&#x2F;M10420" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brookings.edu&#x2F;research&#x2F;interactives&#x2F;2014&#x2F;geograph...</a>

&gt; Corporate executives, their compensation tied overwhelmingly to short-term gains in the market value of their companies, may be responding accordingly.<p>I hear this all the time, and it&#x27;s absurd. The high P&#x2F;Es of innumerable companies (like Amazon) are compelling evidence that investors are well aware of the long game companies play and they approve of it.<p>The charge that companies are eating their seed corn to satisfy wall street assumes that investors are monumentally stupid. Share prices are based on the collective best estimate of the future value of a company. Any hint that the company has sacrificed the long term for the short term will tank the stock value.

The iPhone in your pocket has more computing power than the Voyager spacecraft that left the solar system two years ago<p>Sigh..people who use this example don&#x27;t understand engineering. The Voyager doesn&#x27;t need much power to do its job. An iPhone needs a lot of power to surf the web and play videos. An iphone also has more computing power than a Casio watch that you can buy a Walmart, because the watch doesn&#x27;t need much power to merely display the time. It also has more computing power than a traffic light.<p>As for R&amp;D, another possibility is that universities and small companies may be compensating for R&amp;D stagnation in bigger companies. Many bigger companies acquire small innovative firms instead of doing the research all themselves.

This whole article is assuming that innovation comes from money, and specifically from the money labeled &quot;R&amp;D&quot; in the budgets of nations and companies.<p>Yet, most startups started on shoestrings. Then they got investment from VC firms. These sources of innovation don&#x27;t come from NSF or Microsoft Research.<p>And American innovation comes from far more than money. The culture of American innovation is a huge factor, which isn&#x27;t declining at all.

Funding for pure science is a function of american politics. The problem isn&#x27;t in budgets or even politicians. The people with the money&#x2F;power have lost respect for science. Some feel that scientists have an agenda, others that they are simply untrustworthy, and a large percentage see science as a challenge to belief systems. Those views are the real root.<p>The desire to cut science funding does not come from rational deliberation. So the path to greater investment in science is not through rational debate. The only real path, and it is a long one, is to bring people on board through proper science education.

Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 is the single worst thing to happen to the American university system.

<i>American corporate labs are the stuff of legend. Researchers dream of the halcyon days of Bell Labs and its eight Nobel Prize winners, who brought us the transistor and Unix. Others reminisce about Xerox PARC, which came up with the graphical user interface that propelled the personal computer into just about every home and office.<p>Those days are long gone...</i><p>What about commodity clusters (i.e. all cloud computing), MapReduce&#x2F;Hadoop, Spark, or the deep learning renaissance? Yes, I am super biased, but I think Google and Facebook have done as much to advance technology as their predecessors.<p>But apart from that they have a point. Raw numbers matter, and even though R&amp;D might have a fuzzy boundary with ordinary business, I think that R&amp;D expenditure is a useful signal.

This article seems to be ignoring a new dynamic, in my eyes, which is that of &quot;outsourcing&quot; innovation to third level institutions, and the facilitation of commercial innovation by third level institutes, for industry. It has the effect of shifting innovation from being a fixed costed cost-centre, to being a variable cost with more potential for profit. As we can see from Uber&#x27;s announcement that they want to buy university robotics departments, innovation can be reincorporated if it has a potential return. It&#x27;s definitely a change in the innovation landscape.

Here&#x27;s an article on a related topic, <i>Beyond the Internet, Innovation Struggles</i>: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;beyond-the-internet-innovation-struggles-1439401576" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;beyond-the-internet-innovation-s...</a><p>Mirror, if you can&#x27;t get past the paywall: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notehub.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;8&#x2F;20&#x2F;beyond-the-internet-innovation-struggles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notehub.org&#x2F;2015&#x2F;8&#x2F;20&#x2F;beyond-the-internet-innova...</a>

This article has me extremely confused. They keep talking about a dearth of R&amp;D spending relative to the rest of the world and then present a graph that says we are basically keeping up and have been at about the same level compared to most countries since 1995.<p>Am I missing something here? Is the lack of funding rickety? That all of it is moving into the &quot;D&quot; rather than the &quot;R&quot;? Is there a distinction, or are we just &quot;feeling&quot; like laggards without a good key metric to represent it?

What&#x27;s with the ? in the HN title.

It would be awesome if HACKERnews could see a NYT article and link to the Google search redirect. I hope that&#x27;s not too much of a technical challenge given the name...

US innovation?<p>Okay, Intel is now at, what, 14, 10, 7 nm?<p>Intel can put how many thousand cores in a single processor?<p>There was the Human Genome Project and Craig Venter.<p>The US did TCP&#x2F;IP, IP and BGP routers, and the Internet.<p>James Simons did a lot, he won&#x27;t talk about, but that resulted in a lot of money.<p>Can look at what is going on in fusion at Princeton, Argonne, Fermi, and LLNL.<p>Can see what L. Breiman did in classification and regression trees and, then, random forests.<p>Of course the USAF did GPS, which is accurate to one inch, and now farm tractors can plow very accurately due to GPS.<p>The US has done well with carbon fiber materials.<p>But, IMHO, relatively well informed, is that the US has powerful, valuable innovation coming like drips of a leaky faucet when it should be raging like a massive, wild river.<p>Why the difference? The people managing the money don&#x27;t have even as much as a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue about how to do innovative projects successfully. As soon as they see something beyond what they knew in middle school, they roll their eyes, throw up their arms, scream about <i>blue sky</i>, <i>intellectual fun, games, and self-abuse</i>, etc. That&#x27;s grotesque incompetence.<p>The main exception is the innovation for US national security. A second exception is medical innovation, especially funded by the NIH and the research hospitals.<p>Silicon Valley? It has history majors with LLBs and&#x2F;or MBAs who are 99 44&#x2F;100% non technical looking for routine software for yet another social, mobile, sharing, membership, consumer thingy, throwing their line into their backyard above ground pool hoping to hook another Facebook.<p>We&#x27;re talking totally clueless. Hopeless. Their ability to identify, formulate, evaluate, and pursue powerful, valuable technical innovation? Zip, zilch, or zero. Their technical competence? Even worse. Did I mention hopeless?<p>Instead, just got to have people running projects and allocating funds who actually understand how to innovate. E.g., need an Andrew Viterbi, Gordon Moore, Craig Venter, James Simons.<p>For Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, go back to Harvard, complete a good education, and then try to allocate some funds effectively. Page&#x2F;Brin -- back to Stanford, guys.<p>I&#x27;ve seen a lot in innovation, and what I&#x27;ve seen in the decision makers in Silicon Valley is the lowest, lower than I would ever have suspected could exist. And their ROI? Actually, on average, poor.<p>Blunt fact: Could hold a convention in a commercial airplane wash room of all the Silicon Valley venture partners and CEOs qualified for a problem sponsor position at NSF. Sorry &#x27;bout that.<p>We&#x27;re talking <i>business development</i> people? <i>Marketing</i> guys? Hold on while I go for a big swig of the pink stuff, Pepto Bismol. Darn, too late -- upchucked, on the sheared 100% wool carpet. Those people believe that the crucial core of the innovation they are looking for is some C++ code on Linux done by self-taught hackers.<p>At least when the US DoE and NSF fund fusion research, they don&#x27;t look for really big breakthroughs from 10 year old naughty boys out back playing with matches.<p>In the past there has been innovation, also, when there was money enough involved and people ready to do something: E.g., clocks. Why? Well, in 1800 a wooden ship good for open ocean sailing was big time expensive. But on a successful voyage, such a ship could make a lot of money. But, the ship needed to know its longitude -- latitude was much easier. For longitude, ..., right, need a really accurate clock. Newton knew that, too. So, at whatever effort, ships got some quite accurate clocks. Else the ships too often ended up on the rocks.<p>Innovation can be done; it has been done; here in the US now we should have a raging, wild river of innovation; instead, we have a drip, drip.<p>Net, the people running and funding the projects are technically incompetent. E.g., they just didn&#x27;t study the right stuff, long enough, hard enough in school, and, gotta tell you, now, away from graduate school, no way will they reinvent that material.