Museum of unintended consequences/Innovative environments stifle some innovation

From CSWiki

There are at least 4 well-known innovative environments: biological evolution, the Internet, scientific research, and market economies. (See section 12 of "Putting Complex Systems to Work" (pdf) or "Putting Complex Systems to Work" (.doc).)

In all cases, dynamic entities in those environments depend on sources of energy external to themselves for their persistence. In a market economy, that means most corporations must produce a profit to survive. Thus drug companies, in particular, generally devote resources only to the development of drugs that are likely to produce a profit. That's quite understandable.

But this basic framework therefore reduces or eliminates the likelihood that drug companies will devote any of their resources to what are now called orphan drugs—drugs that deal with conditions that are so relatively rare that it is unlikely that a market large enough to generate a profit exists. These conditions are real, and a certain number of people suffer from them. But the basic mechanism of innovative environments is such that resources are for the most part precluded from being applied to their solution.

Thus the very structure of innovative environments, a structure which for the most part has provided enormous benefits, produces this unintended negative consequence.