Closing the Innovation Adoption Gap

Michael Schrage writing on R&D and innovation observes that growing market competition, not growing R&D spending, is what drives innovation. A successful innovation policy is a competition policy where companies see innovation as a cost-effective investment to differentiate themselves profitably. Scobeleizer meets with Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse. Scobelizer writes reacapping the meet that Douglas Englebart’s eyes told him that taking 25 years for the world to get the mouse was too long and his career would have been a lot more interesting if people could have gotten his ideas quicker. Ideas move around the world a lot faster now due to blogs and video (imagine trying to explain what Halo 2 was going to look like if all you had to describe it was ASCII text). Dare Obasango makes the best observation about the meet and the ideas exchanged when he writes that while he agrees that it takes too long for innovations to make it into the mainstream. Ethernet, SQL databases, and object oriented languages running on garbage collected VMs, are all two or three decades old but only started really affecting the mainstream in the last decade. AJAX which is all the rage this year was invented last century. Dave Winer first started talking about payloads for RSS in 2001 but podcasting only took off over the last year. Certainly we are closing the gap from innovation to adoption but it definitely could be better. Blogs and other forms of mass communication being available to the general public will only accelerate this trend.