How to do innovations?

"In its early years, the semiconductor industry did not have many customers. Few businesses in the 1950s could make use of the expensive new devices that allowed computers to function. But one organization could: the federal government.

 

The first shipment from Fairchild Semiconductor — the company that helped create Silicon Valley — was for the computers inside the Air Force’s B-70 bomber. The Minuteman missile soon needed semiconductors too, as did other Cold War weapons systems and NASA equipment. “It was government that created the large demand that facilitated mass production” of semiconductors, as the author Fred Kaplan wrote in Slate.

 

This story is common across the history of technological progress. Individual businesses often can’t afford to spend much on basic scientific research. Its outcomes are too uncertain for any one company to know which research will be profitable. In many cases, research that seems likely to benefit one industry ends up benefiting a different one.

 

Only the federal government tends to have the resources to make these investments. After it does, private companies then use its fruits to develop innovative and profitable products, spurring economic growth and tax revenues that comfortably cover the cost of the original research.

 

The Defense Department built the original internet — and Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others expanded it. The National Institutes of Health funded laboratory experiments — and pharmaceutical companies created treatments based on them, including for Covid-19. There are similar stories in energy, automobiles, aviation and other industries." 

 

What is the Lithuanian government doing? Lithuanian government is buying golden spoons for conscripts. Lithuanian government is destroying Lithuanian railways and the Lithuanian port, both created with Russian hands and money. Who needs that? Such aggressiveness is liked by rural voters, who on Sunday, after church, decide everything and elect everyone to power in Lithuania. What port? What railways? Do we still have it? My hens will do without it ...