China ahead of US in unleashing a new wave of technology disruption

US needs a more powerful shot in the arm to revive its innovation prowess

There was a time when our internet resembled the American economy of the historic Western frontier: unregulated, vast in opportunities and untouched by large firms. The world wide web was new and cyberspace was, for the most part, overloaded with useless information. “Chances are if you search for an item even with a very good search engine, most of the results you get will be irrelevant,” said Kate Delhagen, a research analyst at Forrester Research of Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1997.

Like the early oil industry that grew throughout the 1800s, the industry players populating the early internet were