Innovation through industrial R&D
Today I read an article in a business magazine about how GE is going to revitalize it's revenue growth through innovation from research. This took me back two days to the 4th of July, which we spent at Greenfield Village. A pretty good place to celebrate America, despite it's remove from the events of 1776. Henry Ford had both Thomas A. Edison's Menlo Park compound as well as Wilbur and Orvile Wright's bicycle shop moved to Greenfield village to preserve them for posterity.Two of these three names are still in everday use and GE is a distant descendent of the Wizard of Menlo Park. Edison's output spanned a range of areas, with over a 1000 patents in his lifetime, it would have to.
While the Wright's were entirely focused on a break through with no short term commerical opportunities, Edison also worked on breakthroughs. Unlike the Wright's, who were otherwise employed, Edison used his many incremental improvement patents to finance his work, which included some entirely new devices, which would not make money until entire commercial systems became available. Motion pictures is a good example. A movie projector needs a camera, a set of newly skilled movie makers, studios, production and distribution systems and movie theaters before it can start making money. This was a long term systems building project.
GE is working with some exotic materials, such as nano-particles, but it seems that GE is talking about incremental improvement in existing systems.
The only really fundamental development these days, that I can think of, would be quantum technology. While quantum applications can be imagined, and their properties worked out theoretically, it's the building of models and the experimentation on those models as a process of invention that seems lacking.
Building electromagnetic devices was readily done in Edison's day's. An inventor, such as Edison, could equip himself with a dozen assistants skilled in mechanics, chemistry, physics and literature research, house them in an isolated, yet state of the art laboratory and proceed to build and experiment on devices. Today, it probably takes someone the size of GE or some national government to work on the quantum devices. And, without a reasonable near term payout, today, as it was in Edison's day's, existing large sources of money are unwilling to back entirely new inventions that will require entirely new systems to support them.
