Looking for something?

What went wrong? There are many answers, but one is that we have become too enthralled by the eureka myth and, more to the point, too inattentive to all the things that must follow a eureka moment. The U.S. has more Nobel Prizes for science than the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, Canada, and Austria combined. But if there were a Nobel Prize for the deployment and widespread adoption of technology—even technology that we invented, even technology that’s not so new anymore—our legacy wouldn’t be so sterling. Americans invented the first nuclear reactor, the solar cell, and the microchip, but today, we’re well behind a variety of European and Asian countries in deploying and improving these technologies.