Ideas Aren’t Getting Harder to Find. They’re Getting Harder to Approve

Ask anyone why Hollywood keeps making sequels.

They will tell you, correctly, that it is safe. A franchise has a known audience and an opening weekend you can forecast before a single frame is shot. An original film is a genuine unknown. So the studio greenlights the sequel, the reboot, the spinoff, and everyone in the room nods, because each of those calls held up on its own.

No studio ever decided to stop making original films. They each made a reasonable choice to fund the one they could predict. The sum of all those small, safe calls is an industry that has quietly engineered originality out of its own pipeline and now wonders aloud where the good ideas went.

It Isn’t Just the Movies

It now takes more than eighteen times the researchers to keep chips improving as it did in the early 1970s. The same progress, bought with an army many times the size.

That is not a semiconductor quirk. Research productivity across the whole economy is falling by about five percent a year, which means it halves roughly every thirteen years. In pharma, the cost to bring a drug to approval has nearly doubled in a decade while pipelines thinned, a slide so reliable researchers named it Eroom’s Law. That is Moore’s Law spelled backwards, because it runs the wrong way. The economists who pulled the broad picture together, Bloom and colleagues, gave their paper a title that asks the question straight: *Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?*

It is not only the spending, either. Work by Park and colleagues in *Nature* found that new papers and patents have grown steadily less disruptive for decades, across nearly every field, even as their sheer volume exploded. More research. Less that changes anything.

Chips, drugs, the disruptiveness of science itself, and a theater full of sequels. The same signature in all of them: rising input, falling discovery.

The Economists Got the Diagnosis Wrong

The economists called it ideas getting harder to find. That is the symptom described as if it were the disease.

The ideas are not getting harder to find. They are getting harder to approve.

The discovery did not vanish. It got declined. Somewhere in that studio, someone pitched the original. In the lab down the hall from yours, a researcher wanted to chase the result that did not fit the plan. At every stage gate and portfolio review, a leader looked at the unpredictable idea sitting next to the predictable one and made the call for predictable. Then made it again the next quarter, and the next, for years.

The data that looks like a drought is not a record of ideas running out. It is the fossil record of a billion safe calls.

I call it Predictability Debt

Predictability Debt: the discovery you owe later for the certainty you bought today.

Every time you fund the sure thing over the unknown one and call it discipline, you take the loan. You get a clean quarter and a portfolio that survives scrutiny now. Later, you owe a discovery you did not make.

Its cost is a thing that never happened. The discovery you passed on leaves no trace. There is no line on any statement that reads “originality foregone,” no variance report for the breakthrough you declined to fund. You cannot manage what you cannot measure, and you cannot measure a road not taken. So the debt compounds in the one place no executive is looking.

One safe call is prudent. A thousand safe calls is a pipeline with nothing new in it, building so gradually that no single decision ever looks like the cause. Then one day the new products do not land, the patents stop mattering, the numbers finally sag, and the room asks why the ideas dried up.

The ideas did not dry up. You spent years declining them, and the bill came due all at once.

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Why good leaders do it anyway

Predictability is not the villain. It is not even a mistake, most of the time.

Leaders are rewarded for it, and rightly so. Roadmaps, quarterly targets, the project that can name its outcome and hit its date. The unpredictable idea cannot promise you a number, which means in a room full of people measured on numbers, the safe project wins. It almost always does.

The deeper reason the smart money keeps taking the loan is not competence. It is an accountability asymmetry. Fund a discovery bet that fails, and the failure has your name on it, in the post-mortem, in the next review, in the story people tell about the quarter. Decline that same bet, and the cost is invisible. The breakthrough you said no to never shows up to accuse you. One path can end your year. The other never appears in evidence. So the system quietly pays you to pass. And pays you again for the next one. The debt is not a lapse in judgment. It is the judgment the incentives reward.

I once interviewed David Cochrane, who ran the team behind the HP 35, the calculator that put real computing in your pocket in 1972. A young engineer named Steve Wozniak reported to David. In his spare time, Woz had built a small computer, partly from parts out of HP’s own supply closet. He brought it to the company first. HP could have had it. The verdict, in David’s own words to me years later: you and who else wants a homebrew computer. So Woz took it elsewhere. The machine was the Apple I. HP held the future on its own workbench and could not see it, because it could not yet imagine who would want it.

Nobody argues against discovery in the room. They just keep funding the thing they can forecast, and the forecast is the tell. The entire value of a predictable project is that you already know how it ends, which means it cannot be where the discovery is hiding.

Here is the trap. The machine built to deliver predictability will, left alone, consume the whole budget. The sequel is not the problem. A studio that makes nothing else is. A research organization with no money allowed to fail has already made its decision. It just has not seen the consequences yet.

The audit you can run on Monday

You will not catch this in your output numbers. By the time research productivity visibly drops, you are already the cautionary tale. The signal fires years earlier, and it is not out in the market. It is in your own funding criteria.

Go read them. Count how many times you asked “what is the expected return” of work whose entire purpose was to find out. Look at the money: how much of it is walled off from the predictability tests, reserved for things that cannot promise a date? Count the people who ran a bet that did not pay off and paid for it with their standing.

One question holds the whole audit. What in my portfolio is allowed to fail?

If you cannot answer it, you do not have an innovation problem coming. You have one now. The decay simply has not reached your income statement yet.

The call

The ideas were never the hard part. They are still out there, still being pitched, still being turned down in rooms exactly like the ones you sit in. They were never scarce. What is scarce is the nerve to make the call when the safe option is right there, certain, and guaranteed to clear the room.

Predictability Debt is just what an organization looks like after years of dodging that call. Every industry in the data lost the same thing the same way: it made the easy decision so often that the hard one stopped getting made at all.

Your job is not to choose discovery over predictability. It is to refuse to let the predictable swallow the whole table, because it will, politely and reasonably, if you let it.

The idea was never the hard part. It never is. The call is.

Sources

1. “Milestones: HP-35 Handheld Scientific Calculator, 1972,” Engineering and Technology History Wiki (IEEE). https://ethw.org/Milestones:HP-35_Handheld_Scientific_Calculator,_1972 
2. Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb, “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” American Economic Review 110, no. 4 (2020): 1104–1144. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20180338
3. Jack W. Scannell, Alex Blanckley, Helen Boldon, and Brian Warrington, “Diagnosing the Decline in Pharmaceutical R&D Efficiency,” Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 11 (2012): 191–200. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd3681
4. Michael Park, Erin Leahey, and Russell J. Funk, “Papers and Patents Are Becoming Less Disruptive Over Time,” Nature 613 (2023): 138–144 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05543-x
5. Phil McKinney, “Interview with David Cochrane,” Killer Innovations podcast. http://libsyn.com/media/philmckinney/KI_20090620.mp3
6. “Apple Co-Founder Offered First Computer Design to HP 5 Times,” AppleInsider, December 7, 2010. https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/12/07/apple_co_founder_offered_first_computer_design_to_hp_5_times