Some observations from startup culture about under investment in r&d even in one of the world’s supposed hot beds of innovation:
1: investors want a return soon and often inadvertantly push for lower variance strategies.
2: it is difficult to sell people on entirely new product categories.
3: people give poor feedback on new product categories and so it is up to the taste of the inventor to refine the product development.
4: legal structures are set up for benefit of those good at navigating legal structures, see why most politicians are lawyers. Many inventors wind up forced out of returns to their inventions.
5: manufacturing new product categories often requires modifications to existing manufacturing capacity, which hurts economies of scale. Often it is difficult to find anyone willing to help manufacturer your thing at all.
6: inventors are cognitively weird and thus socially weird, and fail many tacit social handshakes in the course of trying to coordinate with others.
7: innovators who are both weird and have the requisite taste have a hard time getting along with each other since they have strong opinions, including some strong wrong opinions.
8: there is competition between time spent innovating and time spent networking into groups that would support the business considerations.
9: selection of good business partners is a separate skill from innovating.
10: incumbents will use their existing and considerable cash flows to push back against new entrants, sometimes illegally.
11: consumers on average have short time horizons, so innovations that drive bigger improvements over time can lose out to the fast easy fix that kicks cans down the road.
12: if an innovation is both cheap and something a consumer only needs to buy once it can be hard to support the business.
13: established product areas can have a minefield of IP such that the obvious combinations of features would be legally prohibited from being sold without unavailable license deals.
14: an innovation that interacts with a politicized aspect of the economy, eg recycling, will face strong pushes from unexpected directions unrelated to what the product tries to physically do.
15: an innovation that mainly helps people with problems that involve social desirability bias will be hard to market.
16: innovations that put people out of a job have a built in counter lobbying force.
13: established product areas can have a minefield of IP such that the obvious combinations of features would be legally prohibited from being sold without unavailable license deals.
Do you have links to documented cases where products seem to be unavailable for these reasons?
specifically documented? No. I think some of the obvious examples are in things like batteries, materials science, and computer parts, where there are strong IP fights. Eg AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and ARM all license some but not all of their core tech to their rivals. I’m actually pretty confused about how they determine when to do this vs not, but would guess that this is at least somewhat inefficient by over optimizing on short term gains vs the more nebulous future payoffs of what would be enabled with more licenses.
Legal fight are the result of products that the market wants being made available even when it violates license rights. Companies then just pay the what the court tells them is a reasonable price for the patent violation.
It might be that in practice the friction makes certain products not available instead of just increasing their prices a bit, but I would want to hear from an industry insider that this is a significant problem to believe that.
Some observations from startup culture about under investment in r&d even in one of the world’s supposed hot beds of innovation:
1: investors want a return soon and often inadvertantly push for lower variance strategies.
2: it is difficult to sell people on entirely new product categories.
3: people give poor feedback on new product categories and so it is up to the taste of the inventor to refine the product development.
4: legal structures are set up for benefit of those good at navigating legal structures, see why most politicians are lawyers. Many inventors wind up forced out of returns to their inventions.
5: manufacturing new product categories often requires modifications to existing manufacturing capacity, which hurts economies of scale. Often it is difficult to find anyone willing to help manufacturer your thing at all.
6: inventors are cognitively weird and thus socially weird, and fail many tacit social handshakes in the course of trying to coordinate with others.
7: innovators who are both weird and have the requisite taste have a hard time getting along with each other since they have strong opinions, including some strong wrong opinions.
8: there is competition between time spent innovating and time spent networking into groups that would support the business considerations.
9: selection of good business partners is a separate skill from innovating.
10: incumbents will use their existing and considerable cash flows to push back against new entrants, sometimes illegally.
11: consumers on average have short time horizons, so innovations that drive bigger improvements over time can lose out to the fast easy fix that kicks cans down the road.
12: if an innovation is both cheap and something a consumer only needs to buy once it can be hard to support the business.
13: established product areas can have a minefield of IP such that the obvious combinations of features would be legally prohibited from being sold without unavailable license deals.
14: an innovation that interacts with a politicized aspect of the economy, eg recycling, will face strong pushes from unexpected directions unrelated to what the product tries to physically do.
15: an innovation that mainly helps people with problems that involve social desirability bias will be hard to market.
16: innovations that put people out of a job have a built in counter lobbying force.
Do you have links to documented cases where products seem to be unavailable for these reasons?
specifically documented? No. I think some of the obvious examples are in things like batteries, materials science, and computer parts, where there are strong IP fights. Eg AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and ARM all license some but not all of their core tech to their rivals. I’m actually pretty confused about how they determine when to do this vs not, but would guess that this is at least somewhat inefficient by over optimizing on short term gains vs the more nebulous future payoffs of what would be enabled with more licenses.
Legal fight are the result of products that the market wants being made available even when it violates license rights. Companies then just pay the what the court tells them is a reasonable price for the patent violation.
It might be that in practice the friction makes certain products not available instead of just increasing their prices a bit, but I would want to hear from an industry insider that this is a significant problem to believe that.