This is planet Money from NPR.
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.