March 1st, 2009
Innovation and competition
The topic of how America competes economically in the present world has raised some crucial issues. Is there not a disconnect says one reader between innovation and competition? The best products and the best producers are NOT NECESSARILY THE SUCCESSFUL ONES. This talkback makes a solid point about off-shoring, “if this were true competition, foreign companies making the toxic and poorly made imported products would have gone bankrupt and even Microsoft would have gone under too. Is it really about innovation? Or just doing things on the cheap? It doesn’t reflect well on anybody; most important those companies, their home country, and the level of pollution generated. Of course, we created laws to generate innovation on the ecological front, which helped offshoring to begin in the first place. Funny how that’s not been suggested, I wonder what Mr Fuller has to say about that…”
I must agree. China is now the #1 air polluter on earth, no longer our United States. We buy their cheap goods with no label of environmental effects nor worries about what they’re doing to our atmosphere. U.S. vehicles and utilities cannot keep up with Chinese cities and factories on the pollution front. Off-shoring has been financially successful because energy costs and pollution costs are ignored. Cheap energy is only cheap as long as no value is put on clean air, clean water and uncontaminated soil, food, etc. So much raw material is shipped from North America to China, turned into a product and shipped back. That’s insanely wasteful on every front except the crudest money accounting.
And I’ll certainly agree the “market place” does not guarantee anything about who wins in any competition for market share or profit. The market does not necessarily mean the best consumer product wins. It never means that the most environmentally hazardless product wins. And the market doesn’t help honest or ethical products or systems win. Witness our current financial whirlpool which is sucking honest and crooked investors alike into the abyss. It does not even mean the most heavily subsidized product wins. Do you drink French wine?
Global markets do not operate rationally or under some unwritten laws. The global market is interconnected chaos in action. Only deliberate, thoughtful regulation will ever tame the beast that is greed and curb the human urge to exploit resources and other humans.
Here’s one writer with his two favored causes of dearth of innovation: “1. The constant attack on entrepreneurism in out culture, Open Source, Government and even Hollywood has made the entrepreneur a villain and profit a dirty word. 2. Government bureaucracy: government subsidies to business only ensures money goes not to the best ideas but the politically connected.” I must point out that 19th Century railroads, the Internet and the Interstate Highway system would never have become nationwide without government subsidies. I will agree that often government dough goes to those connected, regardless of honesty or worth. Halliburton to build solar farms? Can you imagine?
INNOVATION IS NOT DEAD
Photo courtesy of Dalhousie University.
A team of unversity students have built a kevlar-bodied car that can apparently do well over one hundred miles per gallon of fuel. The engine: essentially a weed whacker says one of the designers. The car will compete in an auto efficiency contest in California next month. It will be at Fontana, right in the heart of Los Angeles’s smoggiest suburbs.
I must note the students are from a Canadian university. And the contest is sponsored by an Anglo-Dutch oil company.
A newsman since 1969, Harry Fuller has worked for CBS, ABC, CNBC Europe, CNET and was founding news director at TechTV. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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