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1. One of the problems with the use of the word innovation is mixing technological progress with profit. They often don’t come together. Many important kinds of progress are not as profitable as lesser ones.
2. Example: Englebart’s design for the mouse in the 1970s didn’t have a business model to go with it. But the tech remained largely the same before and after Logitech (’82) and Apple (’84) adopted it (successfully) in the 80s.
3. Waves of innovation, if there are such a thing, come because of forces much larger than corporations. It’s a payoff of decades-old investments, often by governments, to develop truly new technologies. We forget, much of today’s web runs on 1960/70s tech discoveries.
4. What seems like a wave, like the “mobile web”, isn’t a singular force. Like real waves, it’s a compounding of undercurrents, weather, and more, that sometimes combines with surprising results. But the wave itself is just the tip of the iceberg (to stay with nautical analogies)
5. Most predicted tech waves in history don't come to pass - or not in the way predicted. Flying cars and jetpacks, and now AI and self-driving cars, depend on solving hard problems that have never been solved before: hard unsolved problems can't be solved in predictable ways.
6. To put it more concisely: if we look to corporations to define the problems worth solving, we’re likely to diminish true progress. It’s organizations/people with longer-term visions, that have better odds of solving our most important problems.
As a footnote, this thread is mostly a response to this: nytimes.com/2019/01/03/opi…
7. Google Maps is a good example of "corp innovation waves" -The U.S. paid for invention of GPS, the tech and the satellites, and maintains it for free. Would a corp do this, given its likely unprofitability? Probably not. But they will build on it in useful and profitable ways.
8. History, even recent years, makes clear the most reliable way to create progress (or if you must, an "innovation wave") is by investing for the long term, w/o profit as the primary goal. This doesn't fit the myths of innovation and startups, but reality and wisdom rarely do.
