Invention Machines’ Case For Sustainable Innovation

Artfldgr's comment above is objectively principled and is a wake-up call to the mindless and parasitical collectivist / leftist ideology that infiltrates much of business and education today. Under various names and pseudo-intellectual drivel, these policies (typically spawning from academia) seek coercive (ie gov't enforced) restrictive and redistributive mechanisms that undermine the value adding essence of market-based commerce; policies that act in direct discord with the optimal allocation of resources via free-choice competitive market factors.
Among the sham concepts being bandied is "sustainability" in innovation. When will people ever understand that the pursuit of long-term profitability seeks to minimize costs, thus minimizes the consumption of resources, therefore encompasses, by default, the concept of sustainability without having to invent and talk about a "sustainability" notion?
The most sustainable innovation strategy is the one that MAXIMIZES LONG-TERM PROFITS (margins)!... not necessarily the strategy that is most repeatable and predictable consisting of frequent incremental revisions driven by here & now customer requests. That brand of innovation is easier and looks good in action, but doesn't advance a product's basic technical foundations which is what provides real competitive advantages via functional superiority and differentiation that is not easily duplicable.
What is more sustainable: A product development portfolio consisting only of incremental changes that yields 5% long-term margins, or a mixed portfolio of incremental and breakout / disruptive innovations yielding 10% long-term margins?
Value addition is the entire basis of economic health. Either the value of what's produced is greater than the value of resources consumed in the process, or individual and societal wealth get liquidated. In a competitive ie free choice environment, profit is the direct measure of value addition, the net good provided = value provided minus value of resources consumed.
When one does not allow fundamental principles to be undermined by sound-good inner logic and vapid politicisms, he recognizes that sustainability is best accomplished by the free market, and that calls for government to ensure sustainable development are politically-motivated shams designed to empower politicians, their agencies, and legions of parasites at everyone else's expense.
The sustainability argument ignores the fact that value is not-resource specific, but is universally applicable, thus whenever one resource becomes legitimately scarce its cost increases making alternatives increasingly attractive. No government or political action is required to drive this process, in fact it only harms efficient resource allocation by distorting valuations. Get government and its policies that appeal to illogical emotion-based minds out of the way. This isn't rocket science, yet many people, especially with political agendas, try to make it seem so.
People with far-leftist ideology are scarce in the engineering community for a simple reason - politically socialistic and social "science" types tend to have little technical and objectively-productive ability relative to their egos. Their ability to provide tangible value is small relative to their desire for economic security or recognition. By downplaying the importance of markets, free-choice, and concomitant competition, they can seek a collectivist environment of unbridled "giving and sharing" where the incompetent can meld into the woodwork while usurping the values and rewards earned by the producers, ultimately undermining everyone. Collectivism is the mindset of anti-individual (thus anti-consciousness) parasites.
I once worked with an engineer who immigrated from the Ukraine in the late 90s, and he said that many American business and government policies seem more restrictive and anti-business than those in the Ukraine during its Communistic heyday. Pretty sad... but why worry? It's just your standard of living (if not survivability)at stake.

This is all interesting... but it amazes me that the problems in this area that stare you in the face cant be seen.
Go to the lemelson site... read the documents on inventing and innovation... which point out its a very individual thing...
then look where they waste their money... on collectivist inventing programs that are safe... they either give money to groups of students to teach collective inventing (which happens as much as collective orgasm), or they give money to established inventors who don’t need the money the way unknowns do.
Take a look at how they teach math now.. abysmal since they abandoned the best methods, and they care more about new collectivist people..
Collectives don’t invent, so the more we move that way, the less innovative we get. to invent is to deny the current wisdom... collectives forbid thinking outside of current false wisdom (it wouldn’t be called ideology if it was empiricist and merit based... it would then be called something like empiricist meritocratic... since its not, its not based on fact. ask Lysenko / Watson / Summers / etc).
How can companies break this cycle? Stop listening to the guys giving politically correct solutions that lean to the collectivist concepts and not foment the individual independent thinker.
Right now I work as a software engineer for a major research hospital.
In my spare time, I work with the PhD professors here trying single-handedly to get technology to the IP department.
Its a hard task.. The professors are socialist. So they think it’s bad to capitalize on intellectual property... so their students never learn to finish the task of discovery, by looking to see what you can do with it. its becomes a selfish practice where they use tax money to find things out they like, and then do for the social justice cause, not commercialize on it. (Under social justice unless something is invented and can be equally distributed to all, it incures HUGE social justice cost, and so is prevented. better learn the implications of false doctrinal improvements that resulted historically in failure).
Since he has been able to legitimize me… I have been able to submit two major inventions to the IP department. In his 30 year career, he has only been a side part of one commercial idea.
I went to Bronx science, but was prevented from college since I come from a poor family. But wait… I am not a minority (Latvian)… in other words; I was told that in the interest of diversity, I don’t get to go to school. This year, Bronx science has underperformed for the first time in their history… so the solutions are harmful. They are no longer merit based, but ideology based and presumptive. We used to be merit based, but we didn’t like the mix of outcomes, so we abandoned that for the soviet way (my family came from there, we know what we are seeing).
So I have no degrees… but I have self studied for 30 years. The docs here are good guys. But they won’t develop ideas… since bad men become wealthy… and if they succeed and become wealthy, they become bad men (or women).
I am slowly changing that with some of them. That an idea has to be looked at by IP even if they don’t think it’s complete. That they should teach students to create a relationship with such departments and regularly ask questions and bounce things.
Heck… he sat on a key piece of technology for a year and a half!!! But after he learned from them and me, it’s now a month response time to work on something. Even worse, he has no excuse since the IP department offers to take ideas 100% off his hands and not interfere with his desired work!!! (And he still gets his share).
I could write reams of stuff on this subject… but no one would like what is say, since it would be designed to be effective, not political.
Like Lemelson I have notebooks full of new technology… and not crackpot things.
The two in the IP area now are a new computational system for genomics and a new calibration system… in a month I will be submitting with the top researcher my idea for high speed identification of bacteria for hospitals. Sitting in the pipeline are about 20 more things that are as good. as you can see, they are not a new wacky wall crawler. One is new circuitry design and coding within a new systemic structure, the other requires new materials invented last year, and the third requires just reconnecting known technologies in a new configuration…
So why am I not out there?
I could say in a word, socialism. But most wouldn’t be able to connect the dots. They wouldn’t see how promises made and changed would result in lack of your own money for school. Ideology choices disenfranchise innocent people for presumptive justice (my family came here after they lost everything in Europe, what do I or they have to do with reparatory things? we were never here, we never did anything). 20 years of scholarships for men being absent in favor of diversity… so those guys like me, had to find some other task to make a living and give up IP creation.
Now ant capitalistic interventionism is accelerating it… the problem started way before we feel it. Look at some of the Obama followers.. the ones with the head bands and the hair, and things… do they look like the kind that would give up a good time to sit in a room for days or weeks on end trying to solve an empirical problem? Heck, they deny absolutism and are relativists who say there is no such thing as empiricism and truth.
Maybe they would make good engineers, doctors, and such? Nope, they are the preferred new person ignorantly bliss.
New tax policies will drain the capital machine more… after all, unlike the past, tax policies, labor law, and other things create a situation where one can’t assemble enough capital to do a job.
Minimum wage means that if a task is cheaper to do than that wage, you either over pay to get it done, or you don’t do it. So it sets a bottom barrier to starting things as one can’t pay less in exchange for labor and future things.
Capital gains taxes and such means I cant assemble enough capital no my own since I don’t have enough capital to generate enough to pass that limit. So I can’t get enough capital pooled for patents, and the new patent maintenance fees, a lawyer, and such.
Inheritance tax will make sure that my son will not be able to take a pool I started to create and finish assembling it to then have enough capital to do anything.
No scholarships for older men mean s I can’t go back to school and leverage that.
Venture capitalists tend to be wolves… (Necessary and good wolves, but wolves just the same). And I come from a poor immigrant family and grew up in a bad inner city area, and so I don’t have the presumptive connections that they think all have.
Heck.. you can go on to confiscatory contracts by employers which seek to own ideas if a person works for them… even if it has nothing to do with job, wasn’t done on the job, etc. Every time I worked for one of those companies I refused to record new tech.
I saved a company more than 3 million a year with some software I wrote myself and presented… I was hounded for what books I got the math from (duh, I am a mathematician, I can invent equations for what I need), and my reward for hours of work, sweat, and such? Not even an amount equivalent to my salary for those hours. They got three million savings a year; I recieved 200 dollars and a lunch.
If they offered 1% of realized savings… they would have more ideas than they could read through. I would have received 30,000… and they would have had to be happy with a 99% value. Instead they gave me less than .06% and expected a lot more from everyone.
So this comes up all the time… and not one person in 30 or more years of me reading about this imperative gives anything useful. Even though some of them make thousands on the lecture circuit claiming so.
After 30 years of trying… I might now get two ideas licensed and generating some capital. But that will be removed for distributive policies like the countries my family fled for a better life.
As soon as I get my cash… I will leave the US… I will set up a company in another country, and I will use my capital to invent… I will be much more successful than here in the US, because we have let our morals decline and have let the wolves control the hen house… so the egg producing hens, like me, are going to leave.
Then when my IP gets made… I can have people work below minimum to get it started, and give them much more later (why not?)… I will be proud that I will help my wife’s Indonesian people and lift them up. I would do the same for people in the inner cities here, but they don’t want my help since they think I am an oppressor, and the system doesn’t want profits since they are bad.
The Indonesians and the Chinese will leave me more of my own money. The Chinese I have spoken to want to help by providing the support elements since support is easy (logistics), inspiration is hard..
And here… we can let tabula rasa, revisionism. Relativism, equality, ruins things as it did in other countries.
Worst is the equality stuff… it denies talent like Marx did.
Want to know why you get such a bad proportion of success? Well, we no longer favor talent. Talent is a no no… talent is why some people earn more than others.
Read Harrison Bergeron to know what we have done to ourselves… but not overtly like in that story. I work with new up and coming researchers, and they are broken people that can’t think very well.
I would LOVE to help improve this situation… but I have been watching it degrade for 30 years with no one having the common sense to realize that it’s degrading for the same reason that the Soviet Union was not tops even though it had the largest country, a large population, smart people, and the most resources on the planet.
It didn’t have individuals… and for 30 or more years we have been removing our individuals in favor of a collectivist future with redistributionist policies.
When your on top… the only way improvement takes you is down..
We have improved American individualism… now we have a moribund future we cant change… how are you going to get all the collectivist anti individual teachers to stop indoctrinating and get them to foment rampant individualism? You can’t… the left has won and the left has never ever anywhere been the top economic force. [could this be why Marxists cant see a good future? They are so stuck in the current collectivist position and prevented from moving out of it, that invention which changes that, is not allowed. Central planning cant function with disruptive technology appearing. So is it any wonder they are crushing this. the term is antithesis. PC, collectivism, etc… are antithetical to the free market, and inventing… ergo, these states steal tech, they rarely invent tech]
Innovation is an individual thing like orgasm… many people can orgasm in one room, even at the same time…. but that don’t make it a collective orgasm. Well many people can brainstorm… but that don’t make the inspirational moment a collective invention, the inspiration was still individual and thrown into the pile.
Heck, even brainstorming is collectivist. It’s a way for the group to pretend that they came up with the ideas that only a few in the group actually generate. In this way, the group is lifted at the expense of the competent individual who learns that he does ok whether he participates or not… and in fact has an advantage with not.. As they don’t work so hard for no reason.
Got to go… sorry it’s so long… there is a large books worth of common sense that I can put forth… but who wants or needs common sense… we have the solution to all problems, ideology…
I could tell them how to put teams together that would work.. But they wouldn’t like the teams… they wouldn’t like the problems… they wouldn’t like the discordance…
So they work against what they want.
This isn’t actually my problem… after all, as soon as I can clear capital, I am going to go someplace else where my seed corn is allowed to grow.
These other places are better anyway… lower taxes, less regulation, and they are past the failed experiment we are about to try… they want success, they want to compete… we? We want to be the soviet union where all promises came true, and the state loved the people to death.
Why?
Because the big guys in such large companies protected with their relationships with the state have a higher need to control others than their desire to succeed innovatively.
Why else abandon the innovative American system that created most stuff around them and move to a dead disproven old system which denies them everything they want, except the presumption of their control (they wont get that either ask Krupp’s)./
If they don’t have enough vision to see that’s a bad idea, they won’t have enough vision to hire people with ability to innovate. They will get lots of funky programs that the IBM commercial makes fun of… (We are laying on the floor waiting for innovation to happen).
Take care, thanks for the forum to talk

I went to this conference and it was quite interesting - not a bunch of sales pitches but real folks talking about trying to do things better.