If you have 50 different plug types, appliances wouldn't be available and would be very expensive. But once an electric outlet becomes standardized, many companies can design appliances, and competition ensues, creating variety and better prices for consumers.

On the supply side, for innovation, you'd say, go look at those R&D budgets, and they haven't moved in the last 20 years. In the case of the US - which is the majority of R&D funding across every category you can name: health, energy, whatever - it's been about $5 billion a year from the Department of Energy.

Kenya’s M-Pesa proves that when people are empowered, they will use digital tech to innovate on their own behalf.

One thing people underestimate is how markets don't allow anyone to do anything except make better and better products. There's not much leeway. The world is a lot more competitive than most people think, particularly in a high-technology area. If a company takes its eye off improving its products, if it tries to do anything that would be viewed as an exercise of power, it'll be displaced very rapidly.

There are GMO skeptics more in Europe maybe than in other places, but not exclusively.

Microsoft is a company that manages imagination.

Nobody spends any money on smallpox unless they worry about a bio-terrorist recreating it.