Hypothetical Question: Where does an innovative product come from?
I want to first discuss a case-example technology to prime the question.
Let’s discuss optical tech such as SFP and QSFP, and how they increased in speed the past 15 years.
I will use this page by prooptix for an incomplete glimpse at the history of this tech [1]. Probably a rough guide at best.
Points of interest:
2006 - SFP+ 10G +
2012 - QSFP+ 40G +
2019 - SFP-DD 100G +
2019 - OSFP-DD 400G +
According to the story, things incrementally got faster.
That’s because apparently new stuff came out, and was commercially available and well adopted etc etc.
However, during these times, alternative options were available for larger places like datacenters, and this is where my question begins to find its footing.
Some harder to find or more obscure solutions offered even faster speeds than what was available.
In 2012, numerous murmurs of Terabit speed was in the theory books. In late 2015 there were murmurs of many terabytes per second in a single strand.
While these technologies are not publicly realized (to my knowledge), they may exist somewhere in the world in a very limited (scientific and defense most likely) capacity.
These technologies, if they do exist, are existing long before what we see available on standard commercial market, and bring me to my question:
Where does an innovation or innovative product come from if it exists in the wild but not available for mass consumption?
If I go out tomorrow, poach a few dozen science journals together and make my own 4TB >100TB single cable data link, and then patent and sell the result (modifying things to be out of conflict with any parties) - is that really a form of innovation?
And on another final tangent, if innovation provides these improvements and such through already given research - is invention really useful to anyone other than for the fact it may be a novel approach?
Links:
[1] https://www.prooptix.com/news/transceiver-form-factors/
