Margins and innovation have a complicated relationship

# How do you deal with the tradeoff that technology commoditizes things but high margins are necessary to invest in technology?
# How do you deal with the tradeoff that technology commoditizes things but high margins are necessary to invest in technology
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- [[Slack - concept]]



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alexanderStudiesSlack2020

Institutions are the second level of a group selection evolutionary system

Most institutions have become cancerous

Systems must take performance hits to get out of local optima

gertnerIdeaFactoryBell2012

The value of planning is inversely proportional to the cost of experimenting

Heat cycles for democratization and cutting edge experiments innovation and discovery

The word ‘novel’ is used as an idea bludgeon in academia

Peer review has failed as an institution

Ideally corporate R+D enables work on a general purpose technology before it’s specialized

Competition and lack of slack  creates specialization

Systemic decay theory of stagnation

Efficiency

Optimizing individual components of a system is often at odds with the system itself

Ideally corporate R+D enables targeted dicking around

Bell labs asked people to do useful things but left them room to say huh that’s funny

Classical Liberalism defaults towards gridlock

Bell Labs and AT&T had timescale alignment

Culturally we expect modern organizations to become a monopoly

Some 80’s deregulation may have been a bad thing

Astro Teller conversation 1 Feb 2022

Getting to new optima is hard

Technology doesn’t solve everything but it does generate growth which arguably does solve everything

A consolidated competitive ecosystem creates a number of effects

Some ideas take a large chunk of resources to assess

How do you deal with the tradeoff that technology commoditizes things but high margins are necessary to invest in technology?

If there is a possibility for a monopoly, an institution is either nonexistent or worthless

Notes on resources around market failure

‘Have your cake and eat it too’ life-games have led to a toxic society

Notes on the changing structure of American Innovation

# Slack - concept 
# Slack - concept 
The canonical article: [[alexanderStudiesSlack2020]]
Coined by [[Zvi Moskovitz]]



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