Yet, innovation may be curbed by even more all-pervasive and pernicious
problems. "The Economist" posed a question to its readers in the
December 2001`issue of its Technology Quarterly:
Was "technology losing its knack of being able to invent a host of
solutions for any given problem ... (and) as a corollary, (was)
innovation ... running out of new ideas to exploit."
These worrying trends were attributed to "the soaring cost of
developing high-tech products ... as only one of the reasons why
technological choice is on the wane, as one or two firms emerge as the
sole suppliers. The trend towards globalisation-of markets as much as
manufacturing-was seen as another cause of this loss of engineering
diversity ... (as was the) the widespread use of safety standards that
emphasise detailed design specifications instead of setting minimum
performance requirements for designers to achieve any way they wish.
Then there was the commoditisation of technology brought on largely by
the cross-licensing and patent-trading between rival firms, which more
or less guarantees that many of their products are essentially the same
... (Another innovation-inhibiting problem is that) increasing
knowledge was leading to increasing specialisation - with little or no
cross- communication between experts in different fields .
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