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Innovation

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Aug 11, 2020 Dani Rodrik

كمبريدج ــ يعد الابتكار المحركَ الذي يقود الاقتصادات المعاصرة، إذ تتحدد مستويات المعيشة بناء على نمو الإنتاجية، وهو أمر يعتمد بدوره على تقديم ونشر التقنيات الجديدة التي تتيح تنوعا متزايد التوسع من السلع والخدمات، تتقلص متطلبات إنتاجه من موارد كوكبنا على نحو مطرد.

يدرك واضعو السياسات والجمهور عموما أهمية الابتكار. لكن التقدير يقل عندما يتعلق الأمر بدرجة استيلاء مجموعات محدودة من المستثمرين والشركات، الذين لا تعكس قيمهم واهتماماتهم بالضرورة احتياجات المجتمع، على أجندة الابتكار.

في الاقتصادات المتقدمة المعاصرة، نجد أن الشركات الخاصة تستأثر بغالبية أنشطة البحث والتطوير، إذ يتراوح نصيب قطاع الأعمال من الإنفاق الكلي على البحث والتطوير من 60 % في سنغافورة إلى 78% في كوريا الجنوبية، مع اقتراب الولايات المتحدة من الحد الأعلى، بنسبة تبلع 72%. لكن القطاع العام هو الذي يوفر البنية التحتية الاجتماعية والقانونية والتعليمية الأساسية التي يقوم عليها البحث والتطوير الخاص.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 12 Comments on this article

Henk Crop Aug 11, 2020

I visited, as a business consultant, the USSR and the German Democratic Republic at the end of the cold war.
It was really shocking to see how decades of state control had completely stagnated society.
Their products/services were old fashioned, had low quality and were expensive.
Example is the GDR made Trabant, a family car. In the ca. 40 years it was produced, no innovations were made. Because the communist party felt it was not necessary.
- Michael Public Aug 12, 2020
  
  You are of course, correct - but at the other extreme - if corporations get only what they want and not what is good for society we get 1920's America and everything bad it brought after. There is a middle road of reasonableness that can be walked, but it requires that those who make the rules be wise and shrewd - something very difficult to achieve.
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Mark Foster Aug 11, 2020

Thank you for your timely column encouraging our collective consideration of the bias inherent in the large highly concentrated segments of the U.S. financial/business ecosystem that invest in innovation.
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Henk Crop Aug 11, 2020

After people lived for thousands of years on subsistance level. It was only through the innovation that took place over mainly the past two centuries that wealth increased, and
it increased even dramatically.
Many of the innovations developed into unforseen directions. But you may expect investors to put their money where the prospects are. The effects of some of these innovations may need curtailing, such as nerve gasses or nuclear bombs.
But to limit innovating in general terms is unwise.
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Jag Patel Aug 11, 2020

The UK government has committed itself to increasing its investment in research & development to 2.4% of GDP by 2027 which places ARPA, the UK’s version of DARPA, the brainchild of the Prime Minister’s special adviser Dominic Cummings, at the forefront of any new research and innovation funding that is likely to be disbursed.

Whereas it is reasonable to expect the State to fund early, high-risk research work into the technologies that will power tomorrow’s economy, there should be a mandatory requirement for its private sector partners to also make a contribution – chief among them is the defence industry.

Whereas new-economy tech firms have been putting significant amounts of their own money into research & development, innovation and creation of intellectual property in recent years, old-economy oligopolists like defence contractors are doing no such thing. And yet they say that they want to work with government, but don’t want to rely upon it. But the fact of the matter is that they are entirely dependent on taxpayers’ money for their very existence.

Recognising the crucial link between R&D, productivity and competitiveness in this important sector of the UK’s manufacturing base, the government makes the following observation (on page 13) of its Defence Industrial Policy published in December 2017:

“Industrial investment in defence research and development has declined markedly since the early 1990s, blunting productivity, competitiveness and innovation in the defence sector; government and industry have a mutual responsibility to reverse this trend. Where we can, we are acting to nurture competition in the defence market and throughout the capability life-cycle, supporting productivity, while strengthening our dialogue with industry about the challenges and needs of modern defence to ensure effective investment.”

For some years now, defence contractors have repeatedly expressed their eagerness to invest private sector investment capital in MoD equipment procurement programmes, provided MoD reveals more information about its spending plans.

Yet, defence contractors’ behaviour is contrary to declarations of intent made in public because they have been found to be hoarding mountains of cash clandestinely and then sitting on it, instead of using it to fund in-house R&D to gain a competitive advantage, boost productivity and ready off-the-shelf products – by advancing the developmental status of their staring-points for the technical solution from its existing condition, to a point where it will satisfy the qualitative and quantitative requirements expressed in the invitation to tender, which will also serve to ease the burden on MoD’s equipment budget.

This amounts to duplicitous behaviour – saying one thing and doing the exact opposite!

The nub of the problem is that defence contractors’ business model is founded on lies and deception; perpetrated by the few upon the unsuspecting many – governments, shareholders, Members of Parliament, employees, academics, the military, supply chain partners, journalists and the wider community – over several decades. Not a shred of honest intent is to be detected anywhere.

An innovative proposal on how to elicit private sector investment capital into defence procurement programmes is set out in a written submission to the Public Accounts Committee of the UK Parliament which has just completed its inquiry into “Defence Capability and the Equipment Plan 2019-29”.

The pdf copy of this paper can be downloaded from:

https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/5413/pdf/
@JagPatel3
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Prashant Kotak Aug 11, 2020

"...private firms’ priorities often lead them to under-invest in technologies that have significant long-run returns..."

If the gist of this argument were true, then the proof would be visible in Germany, where government typically takes a longer term view of incentivising it's economy and private firms into areas with long-run returns. But that's not how it's panned out. Germany, alongside the rest of the EU, has lost out to the US and the far-east in the most important arena of the 21st century: Tech. So the largest tech businesses in Germany are the likes of SAP and Axel Springer, minnows in comparison. And the lockdowns should have disabused anyone of the illusion that this does not entail powerlessness and total dependence on bought-in tech. Every single German business will be locked into digital giant products, be they document and spreadsheet apps, database technologies, cloud services and infrastructure, business comms like Teams, Slack etc, with pretty much zero option to switch out.
- Michael Public Aug 12, 2020
  
  None of those technologies need to be bought from big tech. Big firms just do it because they are lazy and managers like to cover their ass by buying the most expensive. Libreoffice, Postgres, Mattermost etc have you covered.
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Michael Public Aug 11, 2020

Technology needs to be democratized but your approach will not work - it will just create the next version of 'government cheese' and stifle innovation like in the USSR. Rather target the ownership of technology - any technology that is highly successful attracts a progressive 'windfall tax' - proceeds funneled towards financing startups who meet 'socially aligned' criteria.
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Michael Public Aug 11, 2020

Technology needs to be democratized but your approach will not work - it will just create the next version of 'government cheese' and stifle innovation like in the USSR. Rather target the ownership of technology - any technology that is highly successful attracts a progressive 'windfall tax' - proceeds funneled towards financing startups who meet 'socially aligned' criteria.
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Michael Public Aug 11, 2020

You seem ignorant of what is happening in the Tesla production environment. After that statement, Musk has continued his automation drive, albeit more slowly, and it is working very well. The issue was not so much that automation does not work, rather that Tesla was buying external components never meant to be installed by a machine - for example, the seats, the wiring. He is redesigning these parts - the model Y uses a single wiring core that will be machine installed - saving a huge portion of human labor. Don't confuse teething problems with inability to grow teeth.
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