former CTO of Microsoft and founder of Intellectual Ventures, recently spoke on The Magic of Invention:

From a technological perspective, this is the ideal time to be an inventor. We have greater connectivity than we have ever had before, greater access to information and knowledge. The world is a much smaller place now that the Internet can allow us to connect with each other. That’s a terrific stimulus. And the pace of invention has never been faster.

All of these things lead me to believe that the 21st century is going to be an era of incredible and dynamic invention. It’s also a time, frankly, when we have to do it. At the turn of the last century, about half of our workforce was on the farm. By the 1960s it had dwindled to about 6 percent, and today, it’s less than 3 percent. American farms are the most efficient in the world, but agriculture as a major part of the workforce has come and gone. So has manufacturing: It was just getting going in 1900 and peaked at about a third of the economy in the 1950s; today it is about 10 percent. Most companies in America now do a lot of the design, but a huge amount of what they do is built overseas. If we don’t learn to invent, if we don’t foster invention and innovation, it is not clear what we are going to do for a living.

Invention is the source of it all, yet it is strangely neglected. Enough of it happens, and happens randomly, that it keeps us busy. But if you focus on fostering it, it can really be done deliberately. There are people who disagree with this. Maybe you can’t always set out and succeed like the Wright brothers did. After all, there probably were a lot of guys in 1899 who set out to invent something — but we only celebrate the people who got there.

But you sure can kill invention. Creativity absolutely can be strangled. It can be squelched; it can be underfunded. I think it is incumbent upon us to continue to push, in education and in business, to support it. The economies of the 21st century are going to be driven by the magic of invention.

posted by James DeLong @ 9:53 AM | Patents

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