The Innovation Crisis That Never Was

Seven years ago, one of the world's leading researchers in his field shared an insight that would take me years to truly understand.

"Finally," he said, "the technology is catching up with the science."

He'd just handed me a stack of his older papers to illustrate the point - not ceremoniously, just matter-of-factly, like passing the salt at dinner. I nodded politely and filed them away.

The comment stayed with me, nagging to be understood through our work. Its truth only really crystallised when our more creative projects started succeeding - projects where different technologies and capabilities were converging to make old ideas newly possible.

Open any business newsletter and you'll read the same thing: We're running out of ideas. Innovation is getting harder. Research isn't producing like it used to.

Economists have the graphs to prove it. They'll show you how it takes more researchers to generate fewer breakthroughs. How productivity growth is slowing. How we're doomed to a future of incremental improvements.

It's a compelling story. And for years, I believed it. But that researcher's words stayed with me: technology catching up with science.

Then something clicked. I started noticing a pattern in conversations with the most exciting startups and researchers. Each one confirmed what that researcher had seen years ago:

They weren't coming up with new ideas. They were finding old ones whose time had finally come.

Examples are everywhere. Look at Tesla. In 2003, Elon Musk became curious about why electric cars weren't working. The core idea was over 100 years old - electric vehicles had been around since the 1890s. His investigation led him to a crucial insight: multiple technologies were converging to make batteries cheaper. Advanced materials, improved manufacturing, better control systems, and increasing production scale were all pushing battery costs down from over $2,000 per kilowatt-hour toward an inevitable tipping point. While others saw expensive batteries making electric cars impossible, he saw converging technologies making them inevitable. He backed Tesla months later. Today those same batteries cost about $130 per kilowatt-hour - the result of technological convergence playing out exactly as predicted.

He didn't invent the electric car - he spotted when multiple technologies would converge to make it possible.

We've got this all backward. We're not facing an innovation crisis. We're living through exactly what that researcher predicted - a moment where multiple technologies are converging to make decades of brilliant research finally possible.

History shows us how this works. In the late 1950s, every integrated circuit produced in the US went to two premium buyers: the military's missile program and NASA's Apollo program. They paid up to $1,000 per chip. But the convergence of materials science, manufacturing precision, and design tools would eventually make these chips cost pennies. Now they're in everything.

We're seeing the same pattern now with advanced nuclear reactors, quantum computing, and space launch. Big Tech and defense contracts are creating the economic foundation for tomorrow's breakthroughs. But more importantly, they're accelerating the convergence of enabling technologies that make these breakthroughs possible.

Think about it this way: The best ideas aren't waiting for a single breakthrough. They're waiting for multiple technologies to converge:

• Computing power becoming cheap enough
• Materials becoming strong enough
• Manufacturing becoming precise enough
• Markets becoming ready enough
• And most importantly: these factors reinforcing each other

The "innovation crisis" story is dangerous because it pushes us to look in the wrong places. We search for breakthrough technologies when we should be looking for convergence points. We chase new ideas when we should be spotting which combinations of existing technologies are about to make old ideas viable.

The breakthrough moment isn't discovering something new. It's recognizing when multiple technologies are about to intersect. When materials science meets manufacturing capability. When computing power meets sensor technology. When market demand meets production scale.

Think about what's happening right now:

• A medical device that couldn't work until sensors got small enough
• AI making old robotics concepts newly possible
• Advanced materials enabling decades-old space technology
• Precision manufacturing unlocking theoretical designs from the 1960s
• Digital tools making previously complex processes simple and cheap

For researchers and institutes, this changes everything:

• Your old work isn't outdated. It's waiting for its convergence point
• Your archives aren't history. They're opportunity maps
• Your understanding isn't obsolete. It's a lens for spotting convergence

Whether you're a researcher, institute, or innovator:

• Watch for technologies that are approaching convergence points
• Study how different advances might combine
• Look at old problems through the lens of new technological combinations
• Map the technologies that impact your field and track their intersection points

The innovation crisis isn't real. But the opportunity to spot technological convergence - and the old ideas it makes newly possible - absolutely is.

Pick an old idea from your field (a seminal paper, patent, or abandoned project). Take 15 minutes:

Technology Mapping

• List the key technologies it would depend on to take to market
• Map how they interact with each other

Convergence Tracking

For each technology

• What's its improvement curve?
• What's accelerating it?
• What's it enabling?

Find Your Intersection

• Where are technologies starting to converge?
• Which combinations unlock possibility?
• What becomes viable at each intersection?

Instead of asking "Is this idea new enough?", ask "Are the right technologies converging to make this possible?"

Review regularly - convergence happens faster than you think.

The future belongs to those who can spot not just individual technologies maturing, but their points of convergence - when multiple advances combine to make the previously impossible suddenly inevitable.