MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Great Ideas Are Getting Harder to Find

There’s been ongoing dialogue in the past few years about whether tech innovations have plateaued. While some say that we’re still in a golden age of innovation, a 2016 headline in The Wall Street Journal declared, “The Economy’s Hidden Problem: We’re Out of Big Ideas.” The article cited slower gains in science, medicine, and technology that hold back economic growth and posited that U.S. businesses may be too risk averse.

Our latest research shows encouraging signs that new concepts have not been depleted. However, unique, original, and untapped ideas are getting more expensive to find — and that’s a problem.

About the Author

Nicholas Bloom is the William Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University in California, a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the codirector of the Productivity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Charles I. Jones is the STANCO 25 Professor of Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in California and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. John Van Reenen (@johnvanreenen) is the Gordon Y Billard Professor in Management and Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a professor in the Department of Economics at MIT. Michael Webb is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University.

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