Is True Innovation Over?

New York Times:

Innovation is what America has always been about,” President Obama remarked in his recent State of the Union address. It’s hard to disagree, isn’t it? We live in a world dominated by innovative American companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook. And even in the face of a recession, Silicon Valley’s relentless entrepreneurs have continued to churn out start-up companies with outsize, world-changing ambitions.

But we idealize America’s present culture of innovation too much. In fact, our trailblazing digital firms may not be the hothouse environments for creativity we might think. I find myself arriving at these doubts after spending five years looking at the innovative process at Bell Labs, the onetime research and development organization of the country’s formerly monopolistic telephone company, AT&T.

Read the whole story: New York Times

Comments

[Post31]

12:06 PM on 02/27/2012

"Apple, Microsoft, and Google" um these company's spend their time buying and selling trademarks. How is that innovative?

[themoosespeaks]

10:01 AM on 02/27/2012

The choice of a photo of Steve Jobs to headline an article about the skunkworks at Bell Labs is curious at best. It goes to highlight that true innovators are not the up in front of the public types. They quietly sit in their labs and cubicles and change the world. There are no pictures you can put up for people like that: the public wouldn't recognise a one of them.

And then you have the great marketers who leveraged the work of the silent geniuses and put a public face on it.

[Rob Huggins]

09:01 AM on 02/27/2012

Haha, Steve Jobs is the picture that represents real innovation. Steve Jobs represents the old type of innovation of smart people working with poor work-life balance for the dreams of a few smart men with overblown egos.

We are in a new world of innovation. Apple's old way of doing things is not the future, open source is the future. It has even crept into controlling companies like Microsoft. Empowerment is the future in companies like Google, Facebook, Android, and even now Apple. The ability of people to work together outside the innovative killing environment of large corporations is why innovation will come faster than it did back in the old Bell/Xerox/IBM/Apple days.

[NerdyStudent]

01:18 AM on 02/27/2012

Real innovation, unlike Mr. Jobs' products, happens to be priced at 19.99--and it can be anything from the "Perfect Pancake" to the Snuggie. Small-time innovators/inventors are what makes this country so awesome, and weekend afternoon TV so interesting...

Sorry Apple, I'll stick with my Perfect Pancake.

[crayola 08b]

11:29 PM on 02/26/2012

the problem with innovation is that it could be a double edged sword. we are currently reaping the benefits of our innovative past. in doing so that could either lead to innovative stagnation or an era of multifold innovation. i think right now we're somewhere in the the middle though leaning towards stagnation due to economic factors, governmental gridlock and societal apathy.

[HAlexandria]

10:13 PM on 02/26/2012

Facebook, like all of social media, is nothing more than a marketing scheme, marketing is NOT innovation, like day trading, it's a way to make a lot of money providing zero value.

Real innovation is happening every day at many of the world's universities(as corporate R&D fell out of favour decades ago), but it's under staffed, under budget and takes long periods of time.

The NYT author is correct, the world has been living on the fruits of previous generations of researchers, and society as a whole has failed miserably on the "replanting" front.

We get what we sow, we have sowed MBA and Marketing idiots for decades, so society should not be surprised when it reaps a whole lot of nothing in the future.

[Pectin]

10:07 PM on 02/26/2012

Round up the usual suspects so they can whine about the choice of photograph for this piece...