Neal Stephenson On 'Innovation Starvation'

Geoffrey.landis writes "In an essay discussing the space program, author Neal Stephenson suggests that the decline of the space program 'might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done.' He suggests that we may be suffering from innovation starvation: 'Innovation can't happen without accepting the risk that it might fail. The vast and radical innovations of the mid-20th century took place in a world that, in retrospect, looks insanely dangerous and unstable.'" Though the context is different, this reminds me of economist Tyler Cowen's premise that the U.S. has for decades been in a Great Stagnation.

Comments

Patents aren't helping

[pieterh]

Actually I'd conclude that patents are a main cause that innovation has stagnated in the last 20 years. Innovation depends on sharing knowledge.

What I really wonder is whether the strangulation of research will put our survival at risk at a time in history when we need to be smarter than ever about how we use energy, land, water, and raw materials? Why patents are evil.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[0123456]

Patents aren't evil. Only in a perfect utopian world could somebody develop an idea and not have to fear it being ripped off for the profit of others.

I've worked in a patent-heavy industry. There was no 'innovation' being protected, because every company had to cross-license their patents with every other company in order to remain in business. The only things the patents did were keep more efficient competitors out of the market and keep patent lawyers well paid.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[0123456]

But at the same time, I don't like the idea that if I spend a year of my time developing something, someone else can spend 2 weeks making a slight improvement and start selling it.

If your idea is so simple that someone else can copy it and improve it in two weeks, why should you have the armed might of the state preventing them from doing so?

If I also spend a year of my time developing the same idea, but complete my work a week after yours, why shouldn't I have the same rights you do? I spent all that time and now you're saying I can't use my own invention just because you finished a few days earlier?

Re:Patents aren't helping

[Anonymous Coward]

Not trying to steal the thread, and these are not perfect solutions but I suspect they would have a huge impact on bogus litigation and create an ongoing boom innovation investment...

* 5 year legal monopoly beginning the day you file the patent.
This will force patent holders to put up or shut up. You invest in your patent now or forfeit your monopoly.

* A producer requirement rule, you automatically lose in infringement litigation if you do not produce a product or service based on your patent.
I witnessed first hand an engineer who was paid per technical drawing to develop "innovative" patentable designs based on the work of others he found on the internet. He and the patent troll that paid him never invested time, money or effort into creating prototypes or marketable products. The product was a stream of patents that the troll marketed to patent holding ventures to use in future lawsuits against actual producers which may even include the original developers who posted pictures and video of their work online.

A producer rule would not stop lone engineers developing ideas and selling them but they would end up in the hands of producers who would have a limited amount of time (see the 5 year rule) to invest in actually producing the product or service based on the patent.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[cpt kangarooski]

Intellectual property laws protect innovation - not deter it.

Well, that statement is overbroad and wrong anyway.

Trademark, copyright, trade secret, publicity, etc. all fall under the umbrella of 'intellectual property' but have nothing at all to do with innovation. You're really only talking about patents, and it would help matters if you'd say so more clearly. The whole term 'intellectual property' really just adds confusion; it's best avoided.

In any case, what patents are meant to encourage is the invention, disclosure, and bringing to market of useful, novel, nonobvious inventions that otherwise would not have been invented, disclosed, and brought to market, whilst placing no or minimal restrictions on the public in terms of scope and duration, all in order to provide the greatest public benefit for the least harm to the public.

But make no mistake; patents can discourage innovation:

For example, patents aren't free; it costs a fair bit of money to get a patent. Thus, an inventor who comes up with numerous patentable inventions, all of which he could invent, disclose, and bring to market, might have to spend time and money seeking a patent, thus reducing the resources he has available to spend on his inventions directly. If the inventions he chooses to pursue first turn out to be duds, he could be left unable to pursue the others for a lack of resources.

Another example is that patents don't confer a right to practice the invention, or build devices embodying it, etc. Patents are a negative right, and only allow a patent holder to prohibit other people from using the invention in certain ways. Thus, if Alice invents something, and Bob invents some improvement to that thing, they can both get patents, but Alice cannot use Bob's invention without Bob's permission, and Bob can't use his own invention without Alice's permission, and neither of them is obligated to grant permission to the other. This means that an invention can exist, and be well-known, and be entirely kept off of the market for many years (perhaps longer than it's of any value, if the later invention is eclipsed by things that are better still), depriving everyone of most of its value to society.

Only in a perfect utopian world would patents have only beneficial effects. In the real world, they cause both good and ill, and it's important not to lose sight of that, lest you become unable to steer the system so as to produce the most good effects and the fewest bad effects.

And you make it seem like patents are something new but it existed during America's greatest years of innovation.

Not so much as you think. Patents existed, sure, but a patent is just a piece of paper. You have to go to court in order to enforce it on someone else, and for many long stretches of American history, courts tended to find against patent holders for various reasons. From, oh, the 1930's to the creation of the Federal Circuit in 1982, a patent holder stood little chance of success when suing an infringer in the US. I wouldn't go so far as to say that patents may as well not have existed during that time, but they were vastly weaker than they are now. It certainly didn't seem to do much harm during some of our greatest years of innovation. Perhaps you'd agree that weak patents might not be such a bad idea after all?

Re:Patents aren't helping

[Chris Burke]

I've worked in a patent-heavy industry. There was no 'innovation' being protected, because every company had to cross-license their patents with every other company in order to remain in business. The only things the patents did were keep more efficient competitors out of the market and keep patent lawyers well paid.

.

Same here. And I've been told directly by corporate patent lawyers not to see if anything I'm inventing might infringe on someone else's patents, because 1) something involved in what I'm making almost certainly does and 2) if you do a patent search that can show willful violation which is treble damages and screws up the "we both infringe each other so let's create a sharing agreement based on the relative value of our portfolios" negotiations.

As you say, the main real effect is to create an artificial barrier to entry into an industry when it's a minefield of patents.

The other real effect is to give patent trolls free reign to ruin the real innovation that these patent-holding corporations are engaging in because they're immune to the "well you're infringing too so let's just strike a deal and get on with business" tactic, having no products of their own.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[smellsofbikes]

Both time figures were somewhat unrealistic, but the point is copying something is usually a lot cheaper and quicker than developing something from scratch. Certainly I think something could be ripped off after release long before an inventor would see his profit.

That, and some "simple" things come out of long periods of trying to solve a problem. The end solution might be a simple widget, but coming up with that widget as a solution to the problem may have involved significant resources. If someone can then just start producting that widget with no money going to the people who came up with it, you'll see people a lot less willing to spend money inventing.

I'm not sure this answers your question: I work in an area -- integrated circuit design for consumer markets -- where we can patent things until we're blue in the face, and someone else can still come up with another implementation that does the same thing we do, and get it to market. (Despite what so many people claim, the US patent office *does* reject things for being too obvious, like, oh, say, building an LED driver that can work with wall dimmers, so if you want to build those you have to build a specific implementation of a dimmer driver, and patent that, and then someone else will just find another clever way of doing it.) So we do the research, build a product, and everyone else copies it. But we still make money, and the way we do that is by choosing markets where we know it'll take long enough for the copies to hit the market that we'll have already repaid our investment and made a profit. I'm not saying that's the best way of doing things, but one nice side-benefit is that instead of just one solution to the problem, there are a half-dozen, and that's a huge amount of information being dumped into the public pool for future inventors to use. We almost don't need patents at all, because they don't actually help us -- but they do help the world, by requiring people to publish their implementations to problems. We keep investing on innovation because we make money, and the world gets a lot of value from that, as a very nice side-effect.

Now where that doesn't work is, say, drugs. It costs us like I dunno let's say a million dollars to bring a new IC to market. We can recoup that in six months. It takes more like a billion dollars to get a new drug on the market, so you either need to find something that is going to sell a billion dollars in six months or you need long-term patent protection. Maybe that means we should have variable patent lengths, maybe patents should expire in 5 years unless you reapply for continued protection. I don't know. But patents have some obvious and huge benefits over trade secrets. We have trade secrets we've kept for 30 years, and some of them appear to me to be exactly the sort of stuff that'd really help a lot of other designers. I don't think that's a great idea either.

Re:Patents aren't helping

[GospelHead821]

Openness works because ideas can be made abundant at practically no cost. The economy of ideas right now is illustrative of the characteristics of a system in which artificial scarcity is applied to abundant resources. This is important because so many of the big things that we could be building would serve to eliminate or at least reduce scarcity even with regard to material resources. A quote that I read earlier regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement touches upon the same idea: "They mean to show that there is an inappropriate and correctable disconnect between the abundance America produces and the scarcity its markets manufacture." More generally, I am interested in any philosophy that endorses the pursuit of shareable abundance over profitable scarcity.

Markets do not work

[damburger]

The period that Stephenson identifies with a decline in the ability to get 'big' things done coincidence near perfectly with the rise of neoliberalism in the west. The more markets are deregulated, the less ability we have to actually get things done, because corporations will break up anything large scale for profit - with the full cooperation of sleazy, dishonest politicians who are in their pockets.

But a whole bunch of us are ingrained with a kind of market fundamentalism, that the 'invisible hand' will make things right if you just deregulate some more, that you simply cannot see any way to stave off this decline.

It isn't just technology. This deregulated, global market lets 25,000 people starve to death each year, despite global agriculture producing enough food for each person get 3000 calories per day.

Now cue the stream of /.ers defending their dead ideology because they can't face up to the fact that something they support, both with their ideas and their everyday activities, is so corrosive and destructive to our prospects for survival, happiness, and development.

Re:Markets do not work

[0123456]

Really? Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were proponents of "big government welfare statism" were they?

Yes. Reagan called it 'military spending', while Thatcher increased welfare spending during her time as Prime Minister; and, even if they hadn't been welfare statists, they were only in power for a few years of the last forty.

But don't let reality spoil a good rant.

Re:Markets do not work

[DarkOx]

I don't see the evidence. I see plenty of cases where we can't get things done because the "rules" don't allow it. All they way down to the girl down the street can't open a Day Care or a Hair Salon because compiling with Government requirements written in by existing rent seeking industry or liberals who put risk avoidance ahead of basic pragmatism always seeking to eliminate any personal responsibility from everyone.

We have never ever "deregulated" anything! Financial deregulation did not make it any more possible for me and few neighbors to get together and open bank! What it did was simply remove oversight from a group "winners" government had already picked, and continued to preserve them with barriers to entry.

Real deregulation would be just that it would be repealing laws, WITHOUT writing new ones. Its never been tried, on any kind of scale. Still everyone points at "deregulation" as some failure of libertarian policy ideas when what the "deregulation" that has actually occurred does not even remotely resemble what and real libertarian would call deregulation!

Re:You bet.

[Anonymous Coward]

But if you check their lives you will see they got that way by taking a lot of risks

You obviously haven't. There are a few poster examples but most of them were born rich.

Re:Who the hell do you think you are?

[Sponge Bath]

To be fair to damburger, the OP's baseless rant is repeated so many time by brain dead people who can't be bothered with facts that it is easy to become testy after refuting it a few thousand times. It starts with creating a fantasy enemy that bears no relation to anything in reality and applying a label used by people who disagree with you, in this case 'liberals'. Then you claim the fantasy enemy did some horrible thing that never happened, in this case "taking over" the education system.

So damburger's response may be blunt, but it is totally correct to ask for even a tiny shred of evidence to support the outlandish claims.

Resources not innovation...

[Baron von Daren]

I don’t think it is as much an issue of innovation as resource outlay. We live in a world where profit is the prime motive, and thus the prime value. This is fine for markets, but this mindset has overreached markets themselves and become the default value system for societies as a whole.

In the past societies invested in large scale visions for reasons that aren’t always easy to articulate, but that were certainly not limited to economic gain. Whether it’s space exploration or building cathedrals and monuments, large scale projects require massive resources and corporate (as in group) commitment. Our epoch is dominated by self-interest (some might argue enlightened self-interest), market forces and market mentalities. Obviously, there is no incentive for corporations to outlay massive resources for projects that are either risky and/or that offer limited or negative ROI. But that’s not really the issue; I wouldn’t expect them to do so. The problem is that the market mentality has so thoroughly usurped dominance across all facets of society, the common opinion is that everything should be run like a business.

If you run government like a business, or put differently if you govern your society as though it was a giant company, society has no place for grand vision. We are constantly told that only markets know what society needs and are best equipped to efficiently provide those needs. Of course it isn’t profitable to engage in these kind of projects (or not obviously profitable), so markets will not engage in them. Moreover, if government engages in them, it will require resources, i.e. taxes revenues, and we are constantly told that taxes destroy markets (though the actual data doesn’t bear this out). Anyway, I could follow this tangent into a political debate, but salient point for this thread is that we have become a market society and a market only values grand vision if it leads to obvious monetary profit. If the same resources can be spent toward a greater profit elsewhere it would ‘be foolish’ not to spent to spend it elsewhere.