According to Charles Townes, a Nobel Prize winner for his work on the laser, the attorneys for Bell Labs initially, in the late 1960s, refused to patent the laser because they believed it had no applications in the field of telecommunications. Only in the 1980s, after extensive improvements in fiber optics technology, did the laser’s importance for telecommunications become apparent.
In an environment in which populations across the world are either ageing or declining, and investment rates are trapped in a long-term deceleration, including foreign direct investment, it is perhaps an opportune moment to focus on productivity growth as the means of arresting the downturn and charting a new trajectory of pushing outwards the growth possibility frontier.