Bioscience Buzzwords: Seductive Notion or a Way Forward?

Tony Traina July 10, 2013

Innovation- it’s the buzzword of the day. From President Obama’s State of the Union address to Foreign Policy’s latest cover story to initiatives to revive Middle America, the word has been invoked to solve problems from Africa to St. Louis. It’s a seductive notion: if we just innovate, discovering new technologies, drugs, and agricultural products, the global economy can be driven out of the stagnation it’s experienced since the Great Recession. Even the great Robert Solow realized that technological process was the primary driver of long-run economic growth.

But, innovation largely remains a goal without a clear path towards attaining it. Should research and development be funded primarily by the private or public sector? Should the government direct its increasingly limited funds more towards basic research or towards developing products for commercialization?....This means the private sector will have to step up its investment in risky, basic research. Venture capital has dried up in the last five years, and large corporations have only filled a portion of the gap. Some have proposed novel securitization techniques to minimize risk and attract large investors like pension funds. Others have proposed a sort of non-profit organization for useful innovations in academia.

Meanwhile, the government has showed wild ineptitude in “picking winners,” or handing out grants and loans to bring products to market: from the infamous Solyndra collapse to countless others, the government has squandered millions of taxpayer dollars in the name of “innovation.”….To Read More….

My Take - We need to understand that 'innovation' doesn't come about according to government mandates.  Those are often molded by ideology, not reality.  Otherwise the Soviet Union would have been the most scientifically successful place on the planet. Instead they adopted the idiotic biolgical concepts promoted by a nutcase named Lysenko, which just happened to fall into line with Stalin's thinking - which of course made it fact, and anyone who disagreed seemed to dispear - irrespective of the reality swirling all around them, i.e., millions of people starving to death. Innovation ultimately comes about because there is a profit motive and that is the truly powerful force that creates products of value. In short....capitalism!