The future portends even more. Today, new knowledge and technological innovation are the driving forces of the economy. As this slide indicates, people no less venerable than Alan Greenspan have said so. Certainly, this argument helped to justify NSF's record setting budget increase in FY 2001 of seventeen percent. The innovation process is now occurring at a breathtaking pace.
Industrial cycles appear to be getting shorter and shorter.
And as information increasingly becomes the currency of everyday life, we watch this whole pattern accelerate. This is the kind of change that alters our familiar landscapes and questions our values. Eventually, it reshapes our expectations in harmony with the future it has created. But innovation is naturally disruptive - it is the task of breaking the economic rules and being rewarded, over and over again. This dynamic cycle was elaborated by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpter.