It's been said plenty of times here (and many, many other places of course) that innovation is the process of building on the works of others to make something even better. It's not something that happens in a vacuum -- and closing off innovators is a recipe for suffocating innovation. It appears that more research is supporting this. Future Now is pointing to research being done that shows innovators tend to network with each other across company boundaries, and that helps them to share ideas and increase innovation. While top executives think that the researchers they hire should stay hidden in order to build top secret proprietary stuff, it turns out that more innovation occurs when researchers have easy and open access with others working on similar problems at other companies. Ideas and information flows across company borders, but the end result is more and better innovation for everyone. One of these days, perhaps, executives will realize how that works.
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