Innovation is crucial for game-changing advancements in society, whether it's treatments for serious diseases, developments in AI technology, or rocket science. Today on the show, we're airing two episodes from our daily economics show The Indicator. First, a new paper suggests that breakthrough innovations are more likely at smaller, younger companies. We talk to an inventor who left a big pharmaceutical company to start afresh, leading to some incredible treatments for serious diseases. Then, it's off to Mars — or at least, on the way. Elon Musk's company SpaceX did a first test launch of a rocket meant to go all the way to the red planet. The rocket made it up off of the launch pad and lumbered briefly through the sky before self-destructing over the Gulf of Mexico. Suffice it to say, it's not quite ready. NPR science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel walks us through SpaceX's business plan as we try to figure out if this company has the funding and business acumen to reach its moonshot goal. These two Indicator episodes were originally produced by Corey Bridges & Brittany Cronin, engineered by Katherine Silva & James Willets, and fact-checked by Dylan Sloan & Sierra Juarez. Kate Concannon edits the show. The Planet Money version of this episode was produced by Willa Rubin, engineered by Robert Rodriguez, and edited by Keith Romer. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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In the 1980s, Joshua Boja was a chemist for the big pharmaceutical company Merck.
Joshua's job was to try to draw out new compounds and figure out if they could be used for new medicines.
I was making 25 to 50 compounds a year by hand, one at a time.
We were told that it would take about 50,000 compounds before we should expect to get a drug.
So you do the mathematic.
The average chemist would never make a drug in their entire career.
You can imagine him in a lab hoping to find a treatment one day for, say, HIV or hepatitis C.
And he thought that a computer could help him with his quest, so he got one.
Now picture this.
It's four decades ago.
The computer is like the size of a fridge.
He's ready to use it, but there's a problem because he can't even plug it into the wall in the lab because he needed a special electrical connection.
The people in charge said, we can't do that until we study the implications of this for all of Merck's labs around the world.
And I just wanted a plug.
And so it took literally three months to get this expensive computer sitting on a box at the end of the hallway plugged in.
To Joshua, that weight was symbolic of everything that was wrong with a large company.
To be clear, this is not a story about Merck.
This is a story about big organizations, from pharmaceutical companies to car makers, because a new paper suggests that a lot of larger companies aren't allowing inventors like Joshua Bogier to, you know, invent and that these old giants are holding the entire economy back.
Hello, and welcome to Planet money.