Innovation starts with consumers, not academia

“All innovation comes from industry is just wrong, universities invented many useful things.”

But that’s not the argument. Nobody thinks that Knuth contributed nothing to software programming.

Rather the point is that the direction of the arrow is almost entirely wrong. It is not

academia → industry → consumers

This is almost entirely wrong. I am not saying that the arrows do not exist… but it is a complex network where academia is mostly on the receiving end. Academia adapts to changes in society. It is rarely the initiator as far as technological innovation goes.

But let me clarify that academia does, sometimes, initiate innovation. It happens. But, more often, innovation actually starts with consumers (not even industry).

Take the mobile revolution. It was consumers who took their iPhone to work and installed an email client on it. And they changed the nature of work, creating all sorts of new businesses around mobile computing.

You can build some kind of story to pretend that the iPhone was invented by a professor… but it wasn’t.

Also, it wasn’t invented by Steve Jobs. Not really. Jobs paid close attention to consumers and what they were doing, and he adapted the iPhone. A virtuous circle arose.

So innovation works more like this…

academia ← industry ← consumers

If we are getting progress in AI right now, it is because consumers are adopting ChatGPT, Claude and Grok. And the way people are using these tools is pushing industry to adapt.

Academia is almost nowhere to be seen. It will come last. In the coming years, you will see new courses about how to build systems based on large language models. This will be everywhere after everyone in industry has adopted it.

And we all know this. You don’t see software engineers going back to campus to learn about how to develop software systems in this new era.

Look, they are still teaching UML on campus. And the only way it might die is that it is getting difficult to find a working copy of Rational Rose.

In any case, the fact that innovation is often driven by consumers explain largely why free market economies like the United States are where innovation comes from. You can have the best universities in the world, and the most subsidized industry you can imagine… without consumers, you won’t innovate.