Future Perspectives

6 INNOVATION IN ITMARCH 2013

Isn’t it a pity that the internet and the World Wide Web have been such flops? That’s not something you hear every day is it?

Now, of course I don’t believe a word of it. However, over the last 30 years we have lived in an era where the dominant ethos is that the public sector does not innovate and government is bad at backing winners. Only last week I heard, yet again, the familiar claim that introducing the private sector will stimulate innovation.

So, why is it that both the internet and the World Wide Web came from public investment and not from computer companies? Which innovations equivalent to the above two examples in IT came from purely private investment in innovation?

It can be argued that we need to ...