10000 garages
I love this passage from Hot, Flat, and Crowded and keep forgetting to just post it:
The only thing that can stimulate this much innovation in new technologies, and the radical improvement of existing ones is the free market. Only the market can generate and allocate enough capital fast enough and efficiently enough to get 10,000 inventors working in 10,000 companies and 10,000 garages and 10,000 laboratories to drive transformational breakthroughs; only the market can then commercialize the best of them and improve on the existing ones at the scope, speed and scale we need.
But markets are not just open fields to which you simply add water and then sit back in a lawn chair, watch whatever randomly sprouts, and assume that the best outcome will always result. No, markets are like gardens. You have to intelligently design and fertilize them so they yield the good, healthy crops necessary for you to thrive.
More here.