Leveraging innovation

Innovation in the past created jobs. Innovation drove the manufacturing of products and that meant lots of jobs in the factories.

Innovation today means one or a handful of programmers, with a creative spark, writing the next big application like Twitter or those neat tricks for the iPhone. Once that individual or small team is done – they’re done. They don’t create a host of jobs for a lot of other people.

So when the economic experts and politicians talk about “leveraging innovation” what is their plan for the people who won’t have jobs because the innovation stops when those few creators finish? What happens to the people who used to work making products when you ship the manufacture overseas to cheap labor markets?