That may be true of industrial systems, but human systems bite back. If you devise a strategy for the stock market or the startup market to make more money that anyone else, people who get wind of that strategy can (and will) devise a counter-strategy to eat your lunch.<p>Innovation is not zero-sum, but if you create a monoculture of &quot;what works&quot;, then what will almost certainly eventually work in the market is something different than the monoculture. An interesting analogy here is Feyerabend&#x27;s take on creativity in science, &quot;Against Method.&quot;<p>Also, I strongly disagree that Google has figured out a process for innovation. Google does not have &quot;one hit after another.&quot; They have a hit here and there in a sea of failure, just like Microsoft did. IBM, on the other hand, had one hit after another, until the market figured out how to &quot;disrupt&quot; them, and did.<p>As an investor I&#x27;ve spent much of the last twenty years trying to figure out how to make a better risk-adjusted return. Either I&#x27;m a complete idiot, or it&#x27;s not as easy as it sounds.