I agree that innnovation is important and should be protected vigorously, but not that it’s slipping away. My experience in a Fortune 50 company was the opposite - engineers in China and India are competent when it comes to doing the day to day work of developing a product, but have no clue WHICH product to develop. In other words, it has been American innovation that defines what must be done and offshore engineers who implement it, as well as offshore factories that make it. There’s an inverted pyramid effect here - lots of cheap labor workers at the top who have limited skills, a smaller number of more skilled engineers and technicians lower down who perform defined tasks, but at the bottom the entire product or enterprise rests on the creativity and vision of a few. Numbers don’t tell the whole story.
Maybe, but every year the share of worldwide patents filed by China —increases. Granted some are likely shoddy and some are likely
Chinese rip off of American IP.
But still, it can’t all be a sham.
It doesn’t make sense that you can outsource an entire supply chain—and invent the IP — without the suppliers eventually learning how to invent the IP themselves.
(Any grand piano player starts out by playing scales.)
When you say the chinese and indians “ have no clue WHICH product to develop”—the completed sentence should read “for the american market”
But they will know which products to develop for the Indian or Chinese market once they have the skills and know how to do so.
the flip side of this story is the ones making the rounds this morning about chinese hacking of chips in China bound for the USA. This completely kills the idea that there can be any real security in the high tech supply chain.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/04/china-spy-hack-chip-bloomberg-supply-chain/?yptr=yahoo