Читать книгу The New Builders - Seth Levine - Страница 27

Innovation has a fuzzy definition, and it's often confused with invention (also not always crisply defined). For our purposes, we think of innovation as a broad term. Many, if not all, entrepreneurs and especially New Builders, are engaged in our innovation economy. Breakthrough innovations, like the silicon chip that laid the foundation for Silicon Valley, often take a long time and large amounts of money – from the first germ of an idea in a scientist's lab to market. But once they're realized and in the market, they create huge amounts of economic energy, spawning follow‐on breakthroughs and incremental innovations. The spirits of science and entrepreneurship are often entwined, especially in pursuit of these breakthrough innovations. Thomas Edison is a classic example. The phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the light bulb grew out his ability to turn invention into a business process. He found likeminded funders – including Henry Ford (an innovator in manufacturing processes) and Harvey Firestone (the rubber and automobile tire magnate). In the mid‐twentieth century, Otis Boykin,¹⁸ who was Black, invented electronic control devices for guided missiles, IBM computers, and pacemakers. It's a sign of how much harder Black innovators had to work that he ended up in a lawsuit with his employer, Chicago Telephone Supply Corporation, claiming the company was trying to steal his early research for the pacemaker. He lost the lawsuit but left CTS Labs to work on his inventions through his own research and consulting company.

While it's easy to pick through history for stories of the genesis of inventions and innovations that we often take for granted in everyday life, it's much harder to imagine innovations that didn't happen. We described a version of this phenomenon in Chapter 1 when we talked about ghost companies – those businesses that never got off the ground and whose impact on our society will never be known. That these companies are invisible (they quite literally don't exist) is one of the reasons that they have been easy to ignore.

Much of America's innovation comes from companies at the smaller end of the spectrum. That many of these businesses are failing to come into existence is alarming from an economic perspective, but perhaps even more so as seen through the lens of our innovation pipeline. For example, early in the pandemic, researchers in bioscience and health spoke to us of innovations that they hadn't been able to develop, not because the science wasn't promising, but because they lacked support for projects. These included fast‐growing tissue samples for vaccine testing and better ways to build trust for testing and vaccination programs with minority populations. That America is producing fewer new businesses suggests that large swaths of innovation are simply not occurring. Whether it's due to lack of resources, lack of investment in education, training, or a changing relationship with failure that is dampening our entrepreneurial spirit, the fact is by producing fewer new companies our economy is missing out.

The government plays a significant role in funding innovation of the breakthrough kind, especially because breakthrough innovations often don't have the obvious near‐term market applications that private‐sector investors or corporations like to see. But we have been systematically and methodically underfunding research through government channels over the past decades. In his book Jump‐Starting America, MIT professor Jonathan Gruber found that although total US spending on research and development remains at 2.5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), the share coming from the private sector has increased to 70 percent, up from less than half in the early 1950s through the 1970s.¹⁹ Federal funding for R&D as a share of GDP is now below where it was in 1957, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Measured by government funding for university research as a share of GDP, the United States ranks 28th of 39 nations. Twelve of those nations invest more than twice as much as America does on a proportionate basis.²⁰

In other words, the private sector, with its focus on fast profits and familiar patterns – and in the corporate sphere, on maintaining power – now dominates America's innovation spending. Today, even promising entrepreneurs with ideas that lack immediate commercial applications are often abandoned in favor of those with more near‐term promise. And evidence is emerging that big companies may be buying smaller ones in order to control (and perhaps time) their innovations.²¹