Why innovation failed to pump faith in Wall Street?

Here is what I heard from an entrepreneurship seminar: A successful entrepreneur who is a CEO of a billion dollar revenue company disclosed his way of managing a Ph.D. scientist - starve him in a cage for a week, then give him some food, let him out of the cage, and ask him to finish a project normally needs a month of time in one week. At the end of the project, put the scientist back to the cage and restart the cycle. This would bring out the best performance from the talented scientist!

To me this is a perfect example of how to exploit the "talent". It might have been caring out in sectors such as computer chip design/manufacture, software coding, biological science, and recently, biotech and pharmaceutical industries.

The migration of top talents away from basic and applied research to I-bank or the like in the last decade led to the innovation shortfall, which is not only real but may also contributed to the crisis we are in today. The culprit is the eagerness of Wall Street to commercialize novel technologies prematurely in order to generate quick returns on their investment by bubble up one market sensation after another.

To be successful, a company has to beat the EXPECTATION of Wall Street every quarter other face the music when the stock price falls over the cliff. How many breakthroughs can be accomplished in a span of three months? Not even Harry Porter could grow from a magic protégée to an accomplished wizard within a quarter. Why should we force a fledging company or technology to follow the same path of quick bucks?

To put it in the scientific terms, most low-hanging fruits in technology have been discovered and explored. The next breakthrough would require enormous money, time, talents, and luck to materialize and commercialize. An investor who picks the winner among startup companies simply based on who will the first to break even is no different from a person who throws out the baby with the bathwater. Patience is a virtue! But we all want something as fast as the internet!

When we think about innovation in the last decade, the names popping out are Google, Facebook, Apple, or Nintendo. They define the darling of Wall Street. However, no industrial revolution in human history was based on a single technology. If we go after a sustainable economic growth, we need innovative breakthroughs on top of the IT industry. Putting information at your fingertip anywhere and everywhere is nice to have. But how to use this overwhelming information to polish and produce REAL products in other sectors is the real bottleneck.

We have to think outside the box. The old way of running R&D research is outdated in the 21st century. We need to break the traditional barrier and apply the power of cloud computing or the social network to bring out the best among the hardworking scientists. And when we do that, we need to reward those diligent, beautiful minds with compensation commensurate with their contribution and sacrifice. Starving in a cage is not the right way to bring out the best performance from a scientist. It might force him or her to cheat or steal!

One muggle

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• I have to come back and Ding this. -看那月光- ♀ (1235 bytes) () 06/28/2009 postreply 13:45:32

• very good -喜氣連年- ♀ (0 bytes) () 06/28/2009 postreply 17:18:43

• Thanks for the comment. -Rubikscube- ♀ (0 bytes) () 06/28/2009 postreply 23:32:46

• I like the last paragraph -dropinto- ♀ (0 bytes) () 06/28/2009 postreply 15:21:16

• 好長,沒看之前友情頂一個! -喜氣連年- ♀ (0 bytes) () 06/28/2009 postreply 16:34:01

• 回複：Why innovation failed to pump faith in Wall Street? -yijibang- ♂ (142 bytes) () 06/28/2009 postreply 17:47:39

• u r deep,buddy. but不要忘了，貪婪是人的本性，not just 資本家的本性。 -戲雨飛鷹- ♀ (129 bytes) () 06/28/2009 postreply 19:57:44

• PhD,Scientist幾乎都成了貶義詞 -牛二買刀- ♂ (288 bytes) () 06/29/2009 postreply 05:58:15

• 就是這種該死的治國平天下理論拖垮了中國！！！ -mill_st- ♂ (339 bytes) () 06/29/2009 postreply 20:35:06