Likewise these articles are easy to dismiss if you're too far into the SV bubble. Maybe you can qualify why this article is meaningless and answer its points instead of waiving it off? Otherwise you seem to have an unexamined prejudice against criticisms of the venture capital community's funding choices.
By the very nature of innovation you can't define what it is just like you can't ever say for certain whether some abstract piece of pure mathematics will ever contribute to engineering or science (as it very often has). However, like mathematicians we can make educated guesses on what IS NOT relevant or innovative, and by extension will never be relevant or innovative. And of course we will be wrong some times.
The very fact that you think there is a "right way" to "measure" innovation makes me think this article is pretty spot on. Innovation isn't a business, it's not a product or a user base, it's not a stock ticker. More often than not, innovation is the result of thousands, if not millions, of man-hours of passionate and extremely intelligent people who care about their work and want to ACHIEVE something that is currently impossible, impractical, or even undesirable. You can't measure or predict this, all you can do is find those passionate, intelligent people (here's where the measurement part sort of comes in) and give them the resources and support to do something great.
The point of the article is that last part is not happening. There are so many passionate and intelligent people in the Valley but almost no one is giving them the chance to do something great.
By the very nature of innovation you can't define what it is just like you can't ever say for certain whether some abstract piece of pure mathematics will ever contribute to engineering or science (as it very often has). However, like mathematicians we can make educated guesses on what IS NOT relevant or innovative, and by extension will never be relevant or innovative. And of course we will be wrong some times.
The very fact that you think there is a "right way" to "measure" innovation makes me think this article is pretty spot on. Innovation isn't a business, it's not a product or a user base, it's not a stock ticker. More often than not, innovation is the result of thousands, if not millions, of man-hours of passionate and extremely intelligent people who care about their work and want to ACHIEVE something that is currently impossible, impractical, or even undesirable. You can't measure or predict this, all you can do is find those passionate, intelligent people (here's where the measurement part sort of comes in) and give them the resources and support to do something great.
The point of the article is that last part is not happening. There are so many passionate and intelligent people in the Valley but almost no one is giving them the chance to do something great.