Comment by hakfoo
1 year ago
I wonder if the top-down mindset can provide some benefits for innovation.
* State backing-- whether it's guaranteed markets or simply R&D on a government budget-- means innovators have a disruption-free space for work. There's less worry about "we've got to ship some garbage before we run out of runway."
* The goals of government research initiatives are also likely to be more broadly palatable than "the shareholders will love this!" Nobody in the Central Committee is saying "we really want to be the world leader in adding annoying subscription features to stuff." Even the grand boogeymen-- surveilance and social credit-- come from a place of trying to improve public safety and quality of life.
The free market is good at making marketable products. Is it good at basic research that's not directly monetizable, or producing things we need but don't want?
Generally speaking, innovation comes from unexpected discoveries, interdisciplinary thinking and massive amounts of failure.
It's like tree roots randomly sampling a surface until they find a crack to grow into. It's easy to trace innovative pathways with top down direction once they're already obvious, but the initial discovery is a random process enhanced by intellectual, economic, and social freedom to operate Source: I'm doing a postdoc on deep tech innovation policy.