[visarga]

> Engineering activities productivity can be measured the same way the productivity can be measured for any economic activities.

The economy is basically a population based evolutionary process. Its nature is open ended - things that seem important now might have been seen as being useless or stupid a decade or two ago, like neural nets in 1985 and personal computing in 1950's. So we can't tell ahead of time which will become important, but the exploration process and extreme diversity are the main gain. It's all about getting to those stepping stones that we don't even know we will need. Inspired engineering is eventually rewarded with economic success, just like biological evolution.

[andrey_utkin]

So what's your point? Mind you, we're discussing an article on engineering productivity in business.

Nothing is happening without funding.

Business can't run producing things which are not valuable in the moment, it will go bankrupt.

Government can sponsor such things as it sees fit, best if guided by a clear hypothesis that funding it makes the outcomes probabilistically better than not funding it.

When nobody is paying you but you're tinkering with some stuff, then it's you who is sponsoring it with your time and other resources.

[visarga]

That's exactly my point - following the gradient of money you won't get to the global optimum because it's just a short sighted signal. You need to invest into crazy ideas to get anywhere. Unknown unknowns don't get discovered in a systematic way and are not profitable step by step.

If your name is Christopher Columbus and it's 1492, your project gets rejected for being implausible, what do you do?

[nytgop77]

Pitch it to different investors. His own country Italy did not fund him, so he pitched it to Spain.