Creating a New Frontier of Innovation

摘要

Investment in frontier research has always served as the bedrock on which innovation lies. Researchers and other technical leaders have a long and proud history of investigating uncharted territory, of exploring areas that at first seemed daunting - even impossible - but which ultimately opened up new vistas of science, value, wealth, and societal progress. Throughout history, single inventions paved the way to extraordinary achievements. No one dreamed in the 1940s, for example, that the esoteric field of quantum mechanics would spawn the semiconductor and information-technology (IT) revolutions. Engineers working on time-sharing techniques probably never anticipated the World Wide Web and e-commerce. Scientists researching atomic motion most likely did not predict reconfigurable chips or global-positioning devices. Rarely does the invention itself create the revolution - it is the people who figured out how to apply it and, better yet, implement it in multiple and diverse ways. Innovation arises when someone takes a great thing and makes it pervasive, or applies an invention in a way that literally transforms society or the world. Innovation gives birth to new industries and markets that lead to subsequent changes in behaviour and lifestyle.