Innovating The Middle Class

In an interview for our company “Nanotronics Imaging” our new VP Ivan Eliashavich said something ,“15 years ago these ideas could not have been done.” His implication was that time had caught up with some ideas that we had, leading to an invention. In other words ideas often need other ideas to catch up for them to be valuable at all. This is something that is being hotly debated, as the United States is feeling the pain of high unemployment and low worker wages, and the fact that while new technologies may be life improving, they do not pay the bills for most people. Recently Tyler Cowen published an e-book where he claims innovation to be practically dead leading to stagnation in wages and employment. The counter argument to that was made along side his in a great PBS segment. When I wrote a piece about BF Goodrich 2 weeks ago, and how that company ended up employing over 50,000 people (and that was the smallest of the major tire companies) I did realize that the innovation factories of today don’t employee that many. In the PBS piece is was noted that the great social success of Twitter only employees 300 people. The PBS piece did admit to a lag time, where innovation in job creating type businesses may take longer, for instance nanotechology and biotechnology. I do agree with this. But what I am asking myself is whether it really matters that today is different than the industrial revolution, or even the 1950’s, and is there not perhaps a better opportunity that we need to embrace?

I have been a sucker for Michael Moore style nostalgia for 1950’s working class society. I grew up in a town, Akron, which was not so different than Flint. We had people living well, with good retirement plans, who were working class. This is great. What we always considered though was American lifestyle, and not world lifestyle. Suffering internationally was greater then than now. Starvation was prevalent to a greater extent than it is now, and while there were plenty of workers, new technologies were slow to come to market. I do want those days back so that the upper class/lower class gap doesn’t rise, but I don’t think that we can do it in that traditional way, and I don’t think we can do it without the rest of the world being considered. As my father said in a recent interview with me : “International is the new domestic”. In fact when I look at the blog I wrote about BF Goodrich, it wasn’t about those days in the 50’s, but instead about those days much earlier when a business was being born out of an idea, and some risk taking from backers. Right now there is more money available for BF Goodrich type people than ever, even though I do question the patience of those investors. There are also more entrepreneurs than ever. I don’t consider the major companies like Google who only employee 20,000 people to be insignificant, nor do I consider Twitter that only employee 300 minor. Where I do see a problem is that there really is room at the table of middle class employment for everyone when everyone is invited to that table.

This all coincides with Peter Thiel’s assertion that there is an education bubble. He has encouraged students to drop out of college to pursue entrepreneureal ideas. This is very controversial, and like the outlawing of burkas in France, my views on this change nearly daily. There is one part of this that does make sense to me, and that is the enormous amount of technology that exists that is not yet being used for many applications that is waiting for people to take it and do something with, which makes money and employees people. Rubber was that way for BF Goodrich, and hopefully computers and microscopes are that way for Nanotronics. It is tough to say if this will be enough, but it is encouraging. We have not reached this utopia where we have a level playing field, but eventually nationality, and even education will not be a factor, only the ability to connect the pieces of available technology, and find some of that available money to turn it into jobs.