One of the goals of your organization seems to be commoditization of innovation itself in order to free inventors from having to implement or otherwise directly participate in a complete commercial pipeline in order to monetize their inventions. In order for commodity markets to function well and on a large scale, however, there need to be well-understood ways to classify, quantify, and otherwise understand the commodity in question such that it is possible to price the commodity and thus increase accessibility to capital markets. Do you think it might be possible to identify key attributes of innovations in general in order to make invention valuation more reliable and accessible to capital markets? Is the nature of invention such that it would require unique/yet-to-be-developed mechanisms to create such a market or do you see Intellectual Venture's current business model as the ideal?

This just cries out for the obligatory xkcd.

There are a few issues with your line of reasoning.

First is that the increase in productivity has anything to do with teachers. My personal experience has been that it is due to technology (both 'hard' tech like advances in electronics and 'soft' tech like Lean, Balanced Scorecard, and other improvements in the methods by which we organize people) that is responsible for the increase in productivity. The 'teachers' of these tech improvements (consultants, enterprising employees, entrepreneurs, etc.) absolutely have been rewarded.

The second issue is the assumption that the educational system allows for differentiated remuneration based on value provided. If teachers' pay was differentiated based on the quality and quantity of output, there would be incentives (and therefore more effort) by motivated teachers to provide greater numbers of students with a higher quality of education. Many people who actually have the skillset required to improve the educational system would also find it worth their while to participate there rather than in industry. Current systems, however, do not permit such differentiation so there is little economic incentive. Furthermore, interested outside actors (e.g., tomorrow's employers of today's students) have no mechanism by which they can reliably incentivise and provide resources to good teachers, so it is in their best interest to instead withold resources from the K-12 educational system and employ them in internal training systems or to higher ed scholarship programs instead.

The final issue is the fact that progress in every aspect of every society in the world has at times been subject to disruptive change. That is to say, further improvement to the system may be directly detrimental to and against the interests of many current participants in the system. In many cases we can also see that incumbents deferring or preventing the disruption in an area essentially deferred or prevented progress in that area by doing so. Technology and cultural evolution have driven disruptive change in all aspects of industry that are now much more productive than they had been previously, while disruption in the education system has not been allowed by participants in the current system.

In summary, there is no incentive for the educational system to provide education for any purpose besides improving the standardized test scores by which the system's funding is determined, there is no systemic incentive for teachers to teach better or for highly skilled individuals to become teachers in the first place, there is no systemic incentive for outside entities to improve the existing educational system, and there are many systemic barriers to disruptive improvements. In the end, K-12 Teachers are in fact expected to provide less of the total education ultimately required to function in society (one could argue that they have been prevented from providing it), so society has largely distributed the benefits of increased productivity elsewhere.

Just to be clear, I feel that good teachers are among the most valuable people in a society. The issue is that systemic problems essentially limit their ability to actually apply their skills effectively and to receive economic rewards commensurate with value provided. These two overarching problems discourage both idealists (because their ability to make a positive difference will always be limited, minimized, and often even discouraged) as well as pragmatists (because there is no economic incentive). The stranglehold that incumbents have on the system also prevents (or at least significantly hinders) innovative but disruptive improvements from gaining any traction. This has largely resulted in a feedback loop where the improvements in K-12 education have not kept pace with the educational requirements of society, so society allocates more resources to higher ed or other education systems instead, and the people with the knowledge and skills required to improve the system take their skills elsewhere.

In this context, the definition of "directly" that you are implying is useless. E.g., was it the solider, rifle, bullet, the disruption of basic neural function due to the brain being massively traumatized, the cessation of cardio-pulmonary activity, or the resulting cascade failure of metabolic pathways that "directly" caused the enemy combatant to die when shot in the head?

In this context, a political leader is 'directly' responsible for the consequences of a decision when those consequences were reasonably foreseeable without the benefit of hindsight. Every decision has tradeoffs, so it is expected that a political leader has weighed those tradeoffs and decided that the foreseeable positive/desirable consequences outweigh the foreseeable negative/undesirable consequences such that the tradeoff is acceptable and he/she is willing to accept responsibility for the outcome (i.e., both positive and negative consequences).

On the other hand, a political leader is 'indirectly' responsible for those consequences of decisions which were not reasonably foreseeable due to the limits of the knowledge available to them at the time. This acknowledgement does not and should not, however, always absolve the leader of any accountability related to indirect consequences.

To argue that Bush was not 'directly' responsible for American deaths you have to argue that American deaths were not a foreseeable consequence of going to war. That deaths are a foreseeable and well-understood consequence of war does not, of course, automatically mean that going to war was a bad decision. To make that judgment requires that you decide whether or not the positive consequences of the war outweigh the negative consequences (such as dead American soldiers). To paraphrase one of my old JROTC instructors, a politician should only decide to go to war if, on the 10,000th time he does so, he can still fold up that flag, look that kid's mother in the eye as he hands it over, and still believe that it was worth it. FDR and Churchill would have been able to--and history would agree with them. Would Bush have been able to do the same? I personally do not have an answer to that question, but that is the bar that should be set.

This is off-topic, I know you were half joking, and this is not particularly aimed at you, but it irritates me when I see that quote.

The typical application of that quote only indicates that you are intelligent enough to understand your shortcomings but not sufficiently intelligent to be able to understand and internalize the notion that rational action based on the knowledge, understanding, and insight that you do possess will result in better outcomes than either chronic indecision or irrational behavior justified by lack of perfect knowledge. I.e., it only holds if you fall into a sort of 'uncanny valley' of intelligence where you're just smart enough to be your own worst enemy. As my parents used to say, "Smart enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be useful."

If you are intelligent enough to understand that your doubts are actually a useful part of your knowledge--essentially meta-data representing your confidence in the accuracy, completeness, or precision of the data or your understanding of the data and its implications, if you will--you can utilize them to help guide your decisions. This guidance might take the form of risk mitigation steps to guard against (or deal with fallout resulting from) flaws in your decisions and understanding or a realization that you should first obtain more information before making the decision (if circumstances allow this as a viable option).

"Joe did better because he's too stupid to realize that he should've wallowed in self-doubt and indecision like me" is a cop-out--especially if Joe is consistently doing better than you. If group X is able to effectively and consistently marginalize and derail the efforts of group Y over long periods of time, then it doesn't indicate that group X is too stupid to recognize the shortcomings in their knowledge and understanding and is simply getting consistently lucky, it more likely indicates that they understand how to manage those shortcomings better than group Y. Group Y invoking Russel's quote in that situation is them simply burying their heads in the sand rather than confronting the uncomfortable-but-more-likely alternative that Group X is in fact more intelligent (in at least certain areas).

This can be a good step, but you'll want to sort out your vision of the market before you approach potential investors or marketing partners. The direction and priorities of future development will be influenced--if not dictated--by the marketing campaign. That is, after all, the entire point of marketing (as distinguished from sales--actually, first be sure you are in fact looking for marketing expertise as opposed to sales expertise!). In fact, a marketing effort cannot succeed without that kind of authority.

Before you form any kind of business relationship with a marketing partner, therefore, you must first ensure that their vision and your vision of the market are compatible or things will go south very quickly.

Not saying that I agree with your parent poster (actually, I'd guess the assertion to be utter BS), but your reasoning does consider all of the necessary factors to determine that windmills could not make money under those conditions (producing less energy than required to construct).

Cost of energy changes radically based on market environment--a large scale Hydro facility can generate electricity for 10% of the cost of a smaller diesel-fueled power plant. Even in the same physical location, if the cheap coal-fired plant operating today has to shut down because of environmental impact 3 years from now, it may make sense to take advantage of today's cheap energy to manufacture windmills to profit off of tomorrow's soaring energy prices.

Basically, if you manufacture the wind mill in a cheap energy environment and then operate it in an expensive energy environment you can still make a profit even if it generates less energy than it took to build. From an economic perspective it is basically a device by which you can perform energy arbitrage across energy market A and temporally (and possibly physically) displaced market B. Market distortions such as subsidies and cheap capital (minimizing the negative time-value of money impact caused by the temporal displacement of returns) make it easier to make a profit.

In the interest of being pedantic (this is /. after all), I would argue that Society is not necessarily more forgiving, but that the punishment is effectively negligible or trivial to people with sufficient resources.

It is difficult for a working class person to make a comeback simply because a large enough scandal will ruin him/her to the point that all of their attention is focused on scraping together the basic necessities of life, whereas someone with sufficient funds in the bank can focus their time on rehabilitating their public image. The punishment is the same, but their ability to cope with the punishment is dramatically different.

As another example, the average college kid hit with multiple $3k settlement offers for illegally downloading The Hurt Locker may have their life ruined or seriously altered because they are forced to drop out of school as a consequence of the additional financial burden, whereas it is possibly a minor annoyance (maybe increased frequency of disapproving looks from the folks at thanksgiving?) for a rich kid in the same situation. Again, equal punishment but vastly unequal outcomes due to ability to cope with the punishment.

The above are simply natural consequences of the fact that our system of justice is based on, for the most part, equality of punishments for transgressions rather than equality of outcomes.

This is already how it works in every company with which I'm familiar. The sad thing, however, is that there is a significant impact from the obstensively procedural/administrative input from HR.

This comes in 2 broad forms:

1. The disproportionate reaction to poor outcomes. Poor people decisions (of which hiring/firing are perhaps the most visible) are the worst kinds of management mistakes you can make in terms of impact on the organization as well as your career. Following HR 'recommendations' is very effective political cover for the mistakes that every manager will eventually make at some point. This effect is very closely related to a broader category of manager behavior, an example of which that most /.'ers would be familiar with would be 'Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM'.
2. The administrative burden that can be imposed by HR cannot be understated. If HR discards CVs that do not match formal qualifications, or simply declines to forward them unless they're specifically requested, or requires some sort of formal procedure to bypass protocols to make hires against formal qualification requirements, they can effectively make broad categories of hiring decisions even if the authority rests solely with the hiring manager in theory. They may not be able to decide who is hired, but they can effectively decide who cannot be hired via obstructive policy. Management time is precious, and for various reasons HR processes designed to minimize time wasted on non-viable candidates are rarely evaluated for their false negatives (broadly speaking, false negatives are difficult to detect by nature and detection only reflects badly on HR, who is also the only entity consistently in a position to try to measure this, so there is a strong inherent conflict of interest a work here).

Due to the above the issue is much more subtle and difficult to address than you would think, even if C-level execs and HR department heads genuinely want to address it.

Yes, but at this point I'm 29, married, and have to consider the disruptive effect that would have on my family. Also, given my industry experience and exposure, an MBA from Harvard would instantly hyper-charge my career, meaning multiple relocations (already put my wife through one of these due to my most recent promotion, with drastic changes in climate and culture) and very, very long hours at the office. Despite the popular image of fat-cat corporate bosses, my superiors are some of the hardest-working people I've ever known, and I'm coming to suspect that waiting for a reduction in family responsibilities rather than lack of experience/opportunity is the reason many did not move into higher-level positions until their kids were off to college.

Given the above, even assuming HBS would accept an undergrad dropout, I have to wonder if the seat wouldn't be better spent on someone who will give their career their undivided attention.