[tokai]

Actually there have never been so many publications per scientist as there is now. Nearly every metric that is measurable, have been growing exponentially for the last century (no. of scientists, publications, research institutions etc.). There are some indications that we are nearing the top of the s-curve however.

Which begs the question: why is all that research not resulting in equal exponential innovation in our society?

[kazagistar]

Cause all the important research is already done.

Seriously. Why do we assume the difficulty of making meaningful progress to be linear? It seems reasonable that each new discovery becomes harder then the previous one, at a rate equal to or faster then the rate at which we speed up science.

[copperx]

Because that research is mostly done to stay employed. There are no incentives to do breakthroughs.