I partially agree with @ulyssessword that while this article has valuable insights, it overstates the case.
What Civ gets “wrong” (by making it a simple game mechanic) is treating basic and applied research, on platform and specific technologies, work the same way, and also by letting the player know in advance how many Science Beakers lie between here and there for each.
If you know what problem you need to solve, and the general shape of what a solution could look like, you can throw more money and minds at it and get there faster than you counterfactually would.
If not, then more minds and money spent broadly will still directionally produce more research which can be turned into more innovations, but you won’t be able to say in advance how many turns faster you’ll get to any particular invention, or what order you’ll get them in.
You don’t have literally zero knowledge, you can be usefully clever, but you don’t have Civ-like control. Cities and countries with better laws, infrastructure, business culture, ESOs, investors, and baseline wealth levels really do reliably generate and roll out more and better Technology (TM) across the board, and this replicates to a significant degree, and where it fails it’s often pretty easy to do a post- (or, yes, pre-) mortem to figure out what did (will) go wrong and how to do better.
In other words, research turns money into knowledge, and innovation turns knowledge into money; both processes are error prone and inefficient, but there is still a range of better and worse ways to manage each; and doing more of either will put you in a position to do more of the other.
I partially agree with @ulyssessword that while this article has valuable insights, it overstates the case.
What Civ gets “wrong” (by making it a simple game mechanic) is treating basic and applied research, on platform and specific technologies, work the same way, and also by letting the player know in advance how many Science Beakers lie between here and there for each.
If you know what problem you need to solve, and the general shape of what a solution could look like, you can throw more money and minds at it and get there faster than you counterfactually would.
If not, then more minds and money spent broadly will still directionally produce more research which can be turned into more innovations, but you won’t be able to say in advance how many turns faster you’ll get to any particular invention, or what order you’ll get them in.
You don’t have literally zero knowledge, you can be usefully clever, but you don’t have Civ-like control. Cities and countries with better laws, infrastructure, business culture, ESOs, investors, and baseline wealth levels really do reliably generate and roll out more and better Technology (TM) across the board, and this replicates to a significant degree, and where it fails it’s often pretty easy to do a post- (or, yes, pre-) mortem to figure out what did (will) go wrong and how to do better.
In other words, research turns money into knowledge, and innovation turns knowledge into money; both processes are error prone and inefficient, but there is still a range of better and worse ways to manage each; and doing more of either will put you in a position to do more of the other.