Professor, Where Art Thou?

Is academia still driving innovation?

I am trying to be provocative here, true, but just look at MEAN, the new hot stuff in the full stack web development arena for instance: 

• M, as MongoDB, the noSQL database management system, created by, well, MongoDB
• E, like Express, the lightweight, minimalist framework built for Node.js, created by TJ Holowaychuk, acquired by StrongLoop and then by IBM
• A, like AngularJS, the Model-View-Whatever Javascript framework build by Google
• N, like Node.js, the cross-platform runtime environment for developing server-side Web applications. The runtime environment interprets JavaScript using Google's V8 JavaScript engine.

What these innovations/technologies have in common? They are all coming from inspirations grown up in private corporations, not in university. They are not kept private, instead they are offered to the public, usually in the form of open source.

It is like big internet corporations are acquiring the role of innovation incubators that once were typical of Academia

Do you want more examples? Look at these ones then:

• React, the JavaScript library providing a view for data rendered as HTML. 

  It is maintained by Facebook

• Bootstrap the popular front end web framework, originally named Twitter Blueprint, developed by Mark Otto and Jacob Thornton at Twitter 

Should I go on?

The immediate reaction would be to say that these are not really innovations, but products answering to clear customer requirements, and thus  they naturally come from corporations and not from universities, and that is true. But it seems to me that the pace of technology innovation, in the Internet, is not anymore in the hands of professors, but in the visions of CEOs. 

If this is good or bad, I don't know.

What do you think?

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Innovation and Technology are two topics we love in CamsoS Consulting.