How Thomas Edison, Mark Zuckerberg and Iron Man are holding back American innovation

America needs its heroes, and it’s no different when it comes to innovation. “From Thomas Edison to Iron Man, you have this idea of single combat warriors working feverishly in the threadbare den of solitude,” scientist Eric Isaacs said at a Washington conference, dropping a reference to the Marvel superhero who discovers a boundless source of clean energy. But it’s rarely the case that ideas are born, fully fledged, out of the heads of geniuses, just in time to save the world -- outside the realm of fiction at least.

“Romantic myths about creative loners can’t be allowed to overshadow the fact that it’s a big collective enterprise...a multidisciplinary team, a system designed to maximize discovery,” explained Isaacs, who happens to oversee one such facility, Chicago’s Argonne National Lab, the federal government’s first science and engineering research lab. The problem is, the myth of the lone genius toiling away still reigns supreme in the eyes of ordinary Americans and politicians alike. And so policymakers neglect the links in the innovation chain that come after that first Eureka moment. The possibilities often fall by the wayside, leaving scientific breakthroughs in the lab instead of in the hands of consumers or society at large. That was the upshot of the New America Foundation’s event on the future of innovation, research and development, where Isaacs spoke before an audience packed into a narrow conference room. Too often, he argued, the conversation about R&D in Washington ends up stopping at that first phase: funding basic research aimed at letting scientists make their discoveries in peace.