More Science Leads to More Innovation · New Things Under the Sun

Natural experiments in the extent of science show predictable effects on technology that relies on science Here’s another obvious idea that turns out to work: if you want more technological innovation, more science helps. That probably shouldn’t come as a surprise: lots of inventors (not all!) say in surveys that science is an important input to their inventions and about a quarter of patents in 2018 directly cite scientific papers. And we can think of countless examples of technologies with their roots in fundamental scientific advances. But none of that necessarily means that investing in more science will lead to more innovation. For example, maybe some inventors intensely rely on a tiny sliver of useful science, but the bulk of scientific work never leaves the ivory tower. And maybe we already do science that’s most likely to be useful, so that any additional science will be of the latter variety. To see if that’s the case, we can turn to a few examples where scientific production

Natural experiments in the extent of science show predictable effects on technology that relies on science Here’s another obvious idea that turns out to work: if you want more technological innovation, more science helps. That probably shouldn’t come as a surprise: lots of inventors (not all!) say in surveys that science is an important input to their inventions and about a quarter of patents in 2018 directly cite scientific papers. And we can think of countless examples of technologies with their roots in fundamental scientific advances. But none of that necessarily means that investing in mo