Innovators are arriving at the frontier later and knowing less of it
Benjamin Jones built patent histories for 55,000 US inventors and found age at first invention rising 0.6 years per decade, team size on patents rising 17 percent per decade, and the probability of switching technological field falling in 34 of 36 categories. The mechanism he proposed is the part of the innovation-slowdown literature that has survived the methodological fights around it, and it describes a cost a search system can act on.
Insight
