Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
focus is now on the quarterly
financial statement, which
makes it dif
cult for managers to justify the investment in
long-term efforts that will produce no income for many
years if their competitors do not do so as well. Such work
puts more money on the expense side of the ledger and
less on the income side, and no one wants to seem to be
doing less well than their rivals.
Support of long-term research has become the pro-
vince of governments, and industry tends in most cases
to focus on work that can lead to a marketable product in
no more than
five or so years. But, on what I called the
road from the laboratory to the marketplace, there is
often a long development stretch which seeks to see if
the laboratory invention can be scaled up to really make
something useful. Traversing this has come to be called
Crossing the Valley of Death in the innovation chain.
This part of the road from discovery to the visibility of a
broad application needs funding, and the research port-
folio of governments needs to re
ect this reality. It often
doesn
t, and since industry no longer routinely supports
this kind of work, this stretch of the road is often the
graveyard of good ideas.
Part of the problem may be a fear of failure and the
criticism that goes with it on the part of government
of
'
cials. They might take a leaf from the topic of the
venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. They expect that of
every ten investments they make,
five or six will fail, three
or four will limp along, and one will be a major success.
The National Academy of Sciences has a website
www.beyonddiscovery.
org
that gives the history of important developments from their
rst
discovery to their application.
