Standford researchers say big ideas are getting harder to find
Researchers have bad news for entrepreneurs – big ideas are getting harder to find, and innovations have become increasingly massive and costly endeavors.
Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research senior fellow and co-author of a new study, says that so many game-changing inventions have appeared since World War II that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to come up with the next big idea.
“The thought now of somebody inventing something as revolutionary as the locomotive on their own is inconceivable. It’s certainly true if you go back one – or two hundred years, like when Edison invented the light bulb. It’s a massive piece of technology and one guy basically invented it. But while we think of Steve Jobs and the iPhone, it was a team of dozens of people who created the iPhone,” Bloom explained.
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Bloom and his three colleagues, senior fellow Chad Jones, Stanford PhD candidate Michael Webb, and MIT professor John Van Reenen, examined research productivity at an aggregate national level as well as within three swaths of industry: technology, medical research and agriculture.
For another measure, they also analyzed research efforts at publicly traded firms. Bloom and his team find that while research efforts are rising substantially, research productivity — or the ideas being produced per researcher — is declining sharply.
“It’s getting harder and harder to make new ideas, and the economy is more or less compensating for that. The only way we’ve been able to roughly maintain growth is to throw more and more scientists at it,” Bloom added.
The team’s paper says the U.S. economy has to double its research efforts every 13 years just to maintain the same overall rate of economic growth. Putted in another way, the number of researchers required today to maintain the innovative pace is more than 75 times larger than the number that was required in the early 1970s.
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