America's Innovation Shortfall
/Extracted 20SEP2011 from http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/americas_innovation_shortfall.html
When viewed through the lens of the U.S. economy as a whole, rather than the narrow, specific slices of technology or communication, the first decade of the 21st century did not generate expected growth in jobs, revenues, profits, or stock prices...
A little-recognized NSF report released in September 2010, the 2008 Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS), said that only 9% of public and private companies engaged in either product or service innovation between 2006 and 2008. That's before the Great Recession...
In 1999, the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast that 2.8 million new jobs would be created over the next decade in "leading edge" industries such as IT, aerospace, telecom, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and electronic component manufacturing. It never happened. In fact, leading edge industries lost 68,000 jobs over that decade...
Perhaps the most important way to boost the amount of innovation in the U.S. is [to] improve the Venture Capital model, which yields a 10% success rate at best. IDEO, India's IDIOM, Ammunition, fuseprojects, and Smart innovation consultancies are showing that applying design principles early throughout the startup process can raise the VC success rate from 10% to 80%... It is young companies less than five years old that have generated nearly all new job growth in the U.S. over the past 30 years...