8 thoughts on “Innovation Starvation”

  2. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to doing big things (and even not so big things) are government regulations and bureaucracy. Back in the Great Depression, the Empire State Building was constructed in less than two years. Over 10 years after 9/11, the single replacement building for the twin towers is far from finished.

    Obama and his sychophants complain that the 3 years of study to do the Keystone XL pipeline wasn’t enough time. How stupid are they if 3 years isn’t enough time to do a straight-forward study? It’s not like pipelines are radical new technology – we have thousands of miles of pipelines already running in the US and they’ve been working for decades. Glenn Reynolds of InstaPundit pointed out that one of the major dams in the TVA was completed only 2 years after the agency was founded. During WWII under the Manhattan Project, the US went from virtually nothing to having the infrastructure to design and build atomic bombs using two different technologies with major plants at Oak Ridge, Los Alomos, and other places. In the late 1950s through early 1960s, the US went from having rudimentary rockets like the Redstone to fielding three different familes of ICBMs. I just read on Aviation Week’s website that the Air Force has spent 10 years studying the possibility of a new bomber to replace the B-52s, B-1s and some B-2s.

  4. A good SF universe has a coherence and internal logic that makes sense to scientists and engineers. Examples include Isaac Asimov’s robots, Robert Heinlein’s rocket ships, and William Gibson’s cyberspace. As Jim Karkanias of Microsoft Research puts it, such icons serve as hieroglyphs—simple, recognizable symbols on whose significance everyone agrees.

    And that’s why Microsoft irritates me. A hieroglyph is not a good term for a simple, recognizable symbol. Hieroglyphs are complicated and famous for remaining indecipherable for eons. They also don’t symbolize a concept, they’re a part of a written language and denote a sound or syllable. A better term for an icon would be “icon”, except Microsoft already used that word to refer to a squiggly picture that nobody can figure out.

  5. As I read that article it to me back to another, about champions. Projects need champions to move them forward. For SpaceX, Elon is the champion and we can all see the results (naysayers really have no idea what he’s up to.)

    Get champions on a frontier without a government telling them what they can’t do and we might be shocked at what they could come up with.

  6. Big public projects dominate R&D. And those sorts of projects have perverse incentives that reward incompetence and oversized projects.

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