In company after company, you saw the numbers guys trying to justify the cost of research by demanding results in the form of new products this quarter, next quarter, and every quarter after that. And that was fine, says Goldman, if all you cared about was calculating cost/benefit ratios and building a slightly better widget. But if the medical community had tried to conquer polio that way, we wouldn’t have gotten a vaccine that stopped the epidemic in its tracks, because that vaccine was discovered only after years of failure, frustration, and blind alleys, none of which could have been
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