Some individuals believe that there is a limit on the ability of innovative activities to bring new products to the market. This suggests that differentiation cannot go on forever. This line of reasoning is similar to the idea attributed to someone in the U.S. patent office that: “Everything that can be invented has been invented.” There is good news, however, from the patent office. Research has shown that companies can keep innovating and still contribute to the bottom line because it appears that, in general, there are no diminishing returns to scale for R&D expenditures. 1 In essence, continued investment in R&D yields rewards, revenues, and profits. Even though a particular technology may have a performance limit, advances in R&D and in basic science along with customer pull will start the process anew. Moore’s law continues to work for Intel because they continuously re-prime the pump. They have gone from focusing on the clock rate of their CPU, which is constrained by thermodynamic considerations, to exploring multiple CPU cores and restructuring the overall microarchitecture of their chips.
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