Groundbreaking change创新衰败之困导读:随着网络时代的到来,人类体验到智能手机以及社交网络所带来的便利。而与此同时,也有人指出正是这些科技创新(technical innovation),阻碍了一些对人类更有价值的科研进程。
If asked to give one example of a successful innovation in the past 10 years, what would come to mind first?
如果有人让你举出一个过去10年间成功创新的例子,你首先想到会是什么? Apple’s shiny cool gadgets like the iPhone and the iPad? Or the emergence of social networking sites such as the Facebook and its various copycats? We admit these devices and applications have greatly changed our lifestyle. We have never before felt so connected and social networking sites are powerful tools in motivating people to take part in worthy social and civic causes. We churn out one nifty gadget after another, with bigger screens and less buttons. We tweak text and photo-sharing social networking sites to create a new product to share, perhaps audios and videos. There is a cloud for us to store and share our files. All of these are wonderful, but what about truly groundbreaking and visionary endeavors that will profoundly change the world and human life? More than a half century ago science fiction envisioned a future where human beings made routine space trips. They lived in colonies in other galaxies or on the seabed. They made food out of thin air and could live for 300 years. Unfortunately, none of these things will happen in the foreseeable future. Is something wrong with our technological development? Steve Blank, writing in The Huffinton Post, blamed social networking and social media companies such as Facebook for stifling innovation. Blank teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford, Columbia and the US’ National Science Foundation Innovation Corps. He advises people, especially venture capitalists (VC), who want to commercialize inventions. Blank argues that the success of Facebook and other social networking and social media companies is diverting venture capital from serious research with a more uncertain payoff. He is talking about research that truly visionary VCs should be supporting. Instead of “investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay them nothing for 15 years”, Blank says VCs are throwing their money at the latest and possibly greatest social-media idea that can run on smartphones or tablets in hopes of scoring a quick return when it goes big. “In the past,” Blank wrote, “if you were a successful VC, you could make $100 million (637 million yuan) on an investment in five to seven years. Today, social media startups can return hundreds of millions or even billions in less than three years.” On TechCrunch.com, Alexander Haislip, a marketing executive at a tech startup, is even more critical. Facebook may be doing exciting things with advertising, he acknowledges, but how exciting is advertising, anyway? It’s hardly, he complains, “the best use of the brightest minds of our generation”. A 1999 report in the Wire magazine predicted: “The convergence of mobile phones and the Internet, high-speed wireless data access, intelligent networks, and pervasive computing will shape how we work, shop, pay bills, flirt, keep appointments, conduct wars, keep up with our children, and write poetry in the next century.” Thirteen years later, we are already living in the world the report described. Perhaps it is time for us to ask: What now? |
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