Dis­re­gard­ing soft­ware and much hyper­bole (not nec­es­sar­ily mutu­ally exclu­sive), one might think that recent times have been an inno­va­tion desert. This is the opin­ion of Newsweek’s Michael Man­del who believes that the lack of inno­va­tion over the past decade may be respon­si­ble for America’s eco­nomic sit­u­a­tion.

There’s no government-constructed “inno­va­tion index” that would allow us to con­clude unam­bigu­ously that we’ve been expe­ri­enc­ing an inno­va­tion short­fall. Still, plenty of clues point in that direc­tion. Start with the stock mar­ket. If an inno­va­tion boom were truly hap­pen­ing, it would likely push up stock prices for com­pa­nies in such leading-edge sec­tors as phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and infor­ma­tion technology.

Instead, the stock index that tracks the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, biotech, and life sci­ences com­pa­nies in the Stan­dard & Poor’s (MHP) 500-stock index dropped 32% from the end of 1998 to the end of 2007, after adjust­ing for infla­tion. The infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy index fell 29%. […]

Con­sider another indi­ca­tor of com­mer­cially impor­tant inno­va­tion: the trade bal­ance in advanced tech­nol­ogy prod­ucts. […] In 1998 the U.S. had a $30 bil­lion trade sur­plus in [life sci­ences, biotech, advanced mate­ri­als, and aero­space]; by 2007 that had flipped to a $53 bil­lion deficit. […]

A more indi­rect indi­ca­tion of the lack of inno­va­tion lies in the wages of college-educated workers.

via @jakeybro

Some­what related: this week the 2009 State of Inno­va­tion Sum­mit was held in Wash­ing­ton DC. “Com­men­tary” from John Wilbanks (runs the Sci­ence Com­mons project at Cre­ative Com­mons) and from Bioephemera’s Jes­sica Palmer.