"We live in an era of rapid innovation." I'm sure you've heard that phrase, or some variant, over and over again. The evidence appears to be all around us: Google, Facebook, Twitter, smartphones, flat-screen televisions, the Internet itself.
But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if outside of a few high-profile areas, the past decade has seen far too few commercial innovations that can transform lives and move the economy forward? What if, rather than being an era of rapid innovation, this has been an era of innovation interrupted? And if that's true, is there any reason to expect the next decade to be any better?
An article in BusinessWeek Magazine seeks to explain America's economic woes in the past decade due to a lack of innovation, that Michael Mandel says, merely got hung-up for a while until costs can be reduced, margins increased, and breakthrough innovations happen outside of core IT.
This was a really interesting perspective of recent innovation that I have never heard of, let alone even thought about. Indeed, I along with many others think of us being in a period of great innovation, but when you take a step back, I guess you may see something different. It certainly makes sense to think that innovation is really not at the level we think it's at... especially when you take a look at our current economy.