An interview with four leading venture capitalists.
Kramlich: Innovation doesn’t have an on/off switch. How do you measure innovation? A good way is by patent applications. Right now, we’re running at 120,000 patent applications annually, and grants are running at about 70,000. If you look at that relative to historical norms starting in 1900, these are peak levels of applications and grants.
Federman: We are an evolutionary business. Revolutions rarely happen. And when they do happen, you see them retrospectively. The track record of people calling the situation in real time is dismal. The business of innovation has been evolutionary from the start, and it is evolutionary now.