---
title: The Decline in Innovation and the Lost Power of Observation
slug: decline-in-innovation
summary: Papers and patents have grown steadily less disruptive since 1945. The cause is less a shortage of ideas than the structures we wrap around them, and the way back starts with observation.
url: https://carlholland.substack.com/p/the-decline-in-innovation-and-the
---

# The Decline in Innovation and the Lost Power of Observation

An article I wrote with Matt Keon and Abed Karim, published 21 August 2026 (about a 12 minute read). Tags: Innovation, Research, Observation.

Depending on what you read, you could believe we live in an age of abundant innovation. The evidence says otherwise. Park, Leahey and Funk scored 25 million scientific papers and 3.9 million patents by how much each one disrupted its field, and found the work becoming steadily less disruptive from 1945 to 2010, at the same speed across every major discipline. The piece argues the world is not running out of ideas or talented people. Organisations built for control, efficiency and predictability suffocate ideas before they can breathe, incentives teach researchers to publish more and risk less, and the standard financial toolkit biases firms against disruptive work.

It then looks at how breakthroughs used to happen, at Skunk Works, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC and DARPA, and draws out the conditions they shared (small specialised teams, real autonomy, time, and a tolerance for failure), with McKinsey Design Index research showing the same principles pay commercially today. Underneath all of it sits observation, the one factor that belongs to the individual rather than the organisation. The piece closes with the POWER Framework as a starting point for making active observation a habit. POWER stands for framing the problem and letting it sit without an immediate answer, observing in layers, weaving the insights into a narrative and trying to kill them, experimenting, iterating and reobserving, and then realising and integrating the result so it sticks. The full piece is on my Substack.

Read it: https://carlholland.substack.com/p/the-decline-in-innovation-and-the