Progress Is Always Built on Human Ingenuity

by Paul J. Foster, KStJH - Executive Chairman, World Technology Group

The world’s richest resource is human talent and ambition - but it often goes unrealized and unrecognized. As a result, the rate of global progress is not where it could be. World Technology Group offers a global platform designed at its very foundation layer to ignite the collective spark and energy of human ingenuity.

For more than two centuries, innovation has been the engine of human progress. From electricity and aviation to antibiotics and the internet, breakthroughs in science and technology have reshaped economies, extended human life, and expanded opportunity across the world.

Yet today, there is growing concern among economists and scientists that the pace of transformative innovation may be slowing.

At first glance, this seems counterintuitive. We live in an age of extraordinary technological activity. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, space exploration and advanced computing dominate headlines. Investment in research and development has reached historic levels, and technology companies now rank among the most valuable institutions in the global economy.

But beneath this energy lies a deeper paradox.

Much of today’s technological activity represents incremental improvement rather than the kind of foundational breakthroughs that historically reshaped productivity and economic growth. The economist Robert J. Gordon has famously argued that the most transformative innovations - electricity, sanitation systems, aviation and the internal combustion engine — emerged during a remarkable historical window between 1870 and 1970. Those discoveries fundamentally reshaped modern life. Replicating their sweeping economic impact, he suggests, may be far more difficult today.

Economic data increasingly reinforces that concern.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), productivity growth across advanced economies has slowed dramatically over recent decades. During the post-war decades of rapid industrial and scientific progress, productivity often grew between 2-3% annually. Since the early 2000s, that rate has fallen closer to 1% or less in many advanced economies.

This slowdown has occurred despite record levels of research spending and extraordinary advances in digital technology. As The Economist has frequently observed, the modern economy presents a striking paradox: technological excitement has rarely been greater, yet productivity growth has remained stubbornly subdued.

At the same time, research itself appears to be becoming less efficient.

A widely cited study by economists including Nicholas Bloom and Charles I. Jones found that research productivity has declined sharply over time. To sustain the same rate of technological progress, the number of researchers required has increased more than eighteen-fold since the 1930s. The authors summarized the challenge with striking simplicity: “Ideas are getting harder to find.”

None of this means innovation has stopped. Far from it. Scientific discovery continues at remarkable speed, from breakthroughs in genomics to rapid advances in artificial intelligence.

But the nature of discovery has changed.

Today’s scientific frontier is vastly more complex than that of earlier eras. Progress in areas such as quantum computing, climate science, advanced materials and biomedical engineering requires enormous interdisciplinary collaboration and increasingly sophisticated infrastructure.

At the same time, the global innovation ecosystem has become fragmented. Universities, governments, laboratories and private technology companies often operate within institutional or national silos. Competition for intellectual property and commercial advantage can slow the collaboration that breakthrough discovery increasingly requires.

Innovation has always depended on more than brilliant individuals. It requires institutions capable of connecting ideas, disciplines and people.

History provides a powerful reminder of this truth. The great scientific and technological leaps of the modern world were not only the product of extraordinary thinkers but of societies that built systems to support discovery - from scientific academies and research universities to global networks of collaboration.

The challenge today is to renew that architecture for the twenty-first century.

The world does not lack talent, capital or ambition. What it lacks is a sufficiently connected ecosystem capable of translating scientific discovery into global progress.

This is precisely the context in which the WT Group has defined its mission.

The WT Group is built around a simple but urgent belief: that the next era of human progress will require a renewed global commitment to innovation across disciplines, institutions and borders. Its work is grounded in four interconnected scientific realms - Earth Sciences, Life Sciences, Industrial Sciences and Data Sciences - reflecting the reality that many of the most important breakthroughs now occur at the intersection of fields.

Through initiatives such as the World Technology Summit, the World Technology Games, and the WT Institute, the WT Group aims to create platforms that connect scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, policymakers and investors in ways that accelerate collaboration and discovery.

But the mission is not only institutional. It is cultural.

Innovation begins with belief - belief in human potential and in the capacity of ideas to improve the world. The great scientific leaps of the past century were fueled not only by technological capability but by a deep societal confidence that progress was possible.

That belief is captured in a simple principle that guides the work of the WT Group: Celebrate Human Ingenuity.

It is a reminder that the story of progress has always been the story of people - individuals and communities willing to imagine what does not yet exist and then work collectively to bring it into being.

The challenges of the twenty-first century are profound: climate resilience, global health, sustainable energy, digital governance and the responsible deployment of artificial intelligence. Meeting those challenges will require more than incremental innovation.

It will require a renewed culture of discovery - one capable of unlocking the full potential of human creativity.

Humanity’s greatest renewable resource remains its ingenuity.

The task before us is to build the institutions, collaborations and platforms capable of harnessing it.

Because the future will belong not simply to those who invent new technologies - but to those who create the ecosystems that allow innovation to flourish.

And that is precisely why the mission to Celebrate Human Ingenuity has never been more important.