<<Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (both dropouts) that took them to school>> You need the vision, for that you need guys who are out of academia.
“..the idea that fundamental science generates technology is “grossly erroneous”, says Rustum Roy, director of Science, Technology & Society Program at Pennsylvania State University. Usually, technology pushes science. Finding new subatomic particles with the SSC may never be technologically beneficial. Just building the SSC could be—but that’s a very inefficient way to invest in competitiveness. So, asserts Fusfeld of RPI, spending millions in Big Science projects will do little to improve U.S. technology. “People are not looking at this rationale’, he declares.
“The existence of a large science-technology base is useless unless employed to strength the economy. The vision that R&D is crucial for innovation, and consequently strengths the economy is a myth. Studies of successful innovation both the military and civilian sectors reveal that research results initiated innovations in only 5% of the cases studied.” E.A. Haeffner, The Innovation Process, Technology Review, Mar,/Apr. 1973.
R&D activity for technical problem solving during the course of an innovation also appears to play a minor role. A Department of Defence study on the role of research in weapons systems developments during the 1945-1962 period found that only 9% of over 700 significant scientific and technological events associated with the development of 20 major weapon systems could be identified as resulting from basic or applied research.C.W. Sherwin and R.S. Isenson, Project Hindsight, Science, Jun. 23, 1967.
The part played by Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Berkeley, University of Michigan or Carnegie Mellon is not that big. Those guys are interest in funding and they are very good at persuading the general opublic that they deserve. |
