The most popular and comprehensive Open Source ECM platform
Let us know more
Innovation: Does Big Tech Stifle Entrepreneurism?
The combined annual spending of Big Tech (Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft) on research and development is more than the gross domestic product of more than 120 companies. Many would interpret that to mean we can expect big and continued innovation from these companies in the coming years.
Ariel Ezrachi, a professor at Oxford Univesity, contends that the picture is not as rosy as it seems. “So, while the tech barons seemingly deliver many benefits and advance valuable innovation, at the same time they stifle plenty. Their investment levels in research and development seem high, yet disguise their qualitative impact of reduced disruption, reduced plurality, and increased toxicity. Markets may seem competitive yet are populated with innovations that support their ecosystem’s value chains.”
The French think tank Foundation Pour L’Innovation Politique agrees. “The fact that big tech companies have become the new financial tycoons is in fact merely the consequence of a more profound problem, namely reduced competitive intensity in their industry: persistently huge long-term profits, increasing concentration of business and innovation among a small group of companies, and declining entrepreneurial drive.”
James Bessen, a lecturer at Boston University, writes for MIT Technology Review that “innovative startups are growing much more slowly than comparable companies did in the past… proprietary technologies are now suppressing industrial turnover, which has declined sharply over the last two decades. This loss of dynamism has broad negative implications for the US economy. It has slowed the growth of innovative firms.”
