From the Economist, a passage in which the recent meme (and hoax) the TacoCopter is used to illustrate why cheap tech like drones might allow innovators to overcome the increasing burden of knowledge:

“That’s another reason the burden of knowledge issue is less of a concern to me than it may be to others. Advancement of the scientific frontier is growing more difficult. Yet deployment of existing technologies to more productive ends may well be growing easier. Consider the tacocopter. The tacocopter is a not-quite-real-not-quite-a-joke business idea that became a brief internet sensation back in March. The concept is stunningly simple: order tacos on your iPhone and a quadracopter drone will deliver them to your doorstep. As you can read here, the plan would face technical and (especially) regulatory hurdles if implemented today. Yet the potential, for this or similar experiments, is obvious. Cheap, agile drone technology is available now. Building apps is trivially easy. Mapping and location technology and data are getting better all the time. If not drone copters, perhaps 3D printers or autonomous vehicles. It’s a short leap from the ridiculous to the transformative. And the ideas needed to transfer these technologies to everyday life are increasingly the domain of entrepreneurs rather than academics. One doesn’t need 20 years of study to spot profit opportunities.”