FORUM

摘要

In "What Does Innovation Today Tell Us about the US Economy Tomorrow?" (Issues, Fall 2017), Jeffrey Funk starts with an assertion that puzzles me, but after that he develops and provides evidence for a point of view that is quite consistent with my knowledge. He asserts early on that most scholars of innovation see new scientific knowledge as generally providing the focus and capability for successful efforts to develop new products and processes-what is often called the linear model. However, though many years ago the linear model was widely believed in the innovation research community, it has been almost completely abandoned over the past quarter century, a bit too sweepingly in my view since it is not a bad first approximation to much of what is going on in a few fields, particularly biomedicine.