An R&D mystery

Excerpt from an interesting article out of Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research, called "Big Ideas Are Getting Harder to Find," noting the fact that it's taking more and more investment in R&D to maintain productivity in innovation:

"...The number of Americans engaged in R&D has jumped by more than twentyfold since 1930 while their collective productivity has dropped by a factor of 41.

'It’s getting harder and harder to make new ideas, and the economy is more or less compensating for that,' Bloom said. 'The only way we’ve been able to roughly maintain growth is to throw more and more scientists at it.'

The paper spelled it out bluntly in numbers: 'The economy has to double its research efforts every 13 years just to maintain the same overall rate of economic growth.'"

What does this mean? On the surface, ideas are getting more expensive. But I wonder whether it reveals a deeper issue: the methods being deployed are insufficient. 

I wonder, for example, how a strategic nap would fare in a research lab? Or a pogo stick? Or a violin? I wonder how much disciplined daydreaming goes on? I wonder how much serendipity is designed into the physical environments. I wonder whether there's much value placed on divergent diversion at all.

I wonder... 

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