| The article contradicts itself. It starts with polio vaccine, which was an amazing product that people needed. It as not a hard sell at all, lots of people died because of polio. Then he puts the counterexample with penicillin and says it took 20 years to sell. But it is wrong in the sense that it took 20 years in developing the industrial process that made penicillin cheap. Not because people did not want it, but because it was a real hard problem to solve. I read years ago a book about the history of Penicillin and there were tremendous technical roadblocks that made the industrial production of it a chimera(until they were solved). I believe they won the novel price for solving this technical roadblocks(the industrial process, not just the discovery). You can't analyze it backwards, from the point when all these roadblocks were solved and say, hey! people did no like it! The equivalent today is nuclear fusion. It has technical roadblocks that makes it a chimera until they are solved. It is not that people do not want nuclear fusion, it is that they doubt scientist will solve the roadblocks so financing is very weak. The real problem is that nobody(or very few) believe in what does not exist, what they can not see. In the Bible it is called "Faith". Innovation is by definition creating something that did not exist before. Innovation needs people that could see the future as real, even when it does not exist yet. They are called visionaries, and are highly problematic people. Most people can't understand them, because they are dreamers, "pie in the sky" people. By the way, most of those visionaries are wrong in their visions, and consume the wealth of those from the "real world" that trust them. 9 out of 10. In fact, for a long time inventors were considered "Snake oil" salespeople, scammers. The only difference is that today failing 9 times out of 10 is considered normal business and VCs approach it like a numbers game: They know the 1 out of 10 that success will pay for the failures. The article makes a wrong assumption: That technologies are fixed and finished, you sell them and people do not want them. But that is not the case, technologies evolve continuously: Take lithium batteries:They have been improving 7% a year, looks like nothing but it is exponential change, you see 10 years, 15 and the product is completely different. I bought a RepRap machine when 3d printers patents expired. It was crap, nothing to do with RepRap machines today once 300.000 or more printers have been sold, and in the future when millions of 3d printers are sold the change will accelerate more, because more people will use and modify their printers. Electric cars, solar panels, wind energy technologies evolve. When they are mass produced, prices get cheaper, as they get cheaper, more people want it, as there is bigger market, more companies invest in R&D, and technologies improve more. |