The Technology Factory

The brainchild of Jorge Sabato, an Argentine physicist, the "technology factory" is the result of research and development conducted with maximal cooperation between education, industry, and the scientific community. While the idea was perhaps most effectively used by the South Koreans, Sabato's insight suggested that tight coordination between industry and academia can create sustainable development.

Seeing the research process as an industrial input with predictable spinoffs and externalities is a truly modern phenomenon. The notion of a planned "discovery date" would have seemed laughable to the Greeks and Romans, yet the technology press today is full of fantasical products that are "just around the corner". The most seminal example of predictable innovation is no doubt Moore's Law. Really just an observation that the number of transistors on a cutting edge microchip seems to double at a high, yet predictable rate, Moore's Law demonstrates the height of our predictable future. The truly amazing thing about Moore's Law is that the observation has held with only minor changes for decades. The average user of computer technology has no real idea of the complex inner workings of their machines, yet the outputs of the infamous "black box" continue to shoot out faster every year without fail.

The technology factory is the logical outgrowth of the modern need to systemize the search for knowledge. Each puzzle yields results that are individually unpredictable but taken together form an unmistakable pattern. Knowing that a certain level of resources applied to a broad area of research with yield predictable results is not particularly valuable when facing individual experiments, yet decision-makers depend on this knowledge to make decisions that ultimately influence the level of technology available to us all.