It sounds like you're making the claim that media coverage is a useful proxy (at all) for innovation occurring in a region. In case I'm not misunderstanding you, do you also think that the stories broadcast on CNN are a useful compilation of the most important global issues right now? I don't really know what else to say about that.
As with other people in this thread, I think your issue here is that one hears about things in their speculative research-study phase (when there's often still 95% of the work to be done for the findings to be actually used), and then lose interest and (somewhat subconsciously) stop classifying it as "innovation". You'll notice that when you do this, literally everything falls through the cracks between "vaporware" and "not interesting anymore and therefore not innovation". In a response to another commenter, I gave a more complete response (of off-the-top-of-my-head general examples): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988431
EDIT: Ah haha, I just realized that your newspaper comment was in direct response to my allusion to a newspaper. The second paragraph of my comment is still relevant though. As an example, there was a cellular matrix spray that the military was investigating for immediate application to large open wounds which had FANTASTIC potential for promoting the healing process (by sealing things up a lot more quickly without foreign materials and thus lowering chance for infection by an INCREDIBLE amount, etc). Newspapers won't give you constant updates about (e.g.) every step of the process of bringing this to market, because the only way to add new information is to go into technical detail, which will turn off tons of readers.
That doesn't prevent you from seeing the story in the newspaper during its eye-catching vaporware phase, and then following it on your own after that. (Note that even this latter step is unnecessary if you have at least a decent ballpark of what percent of things like that never end up being feasible for actual usage).
EDIT2: To be absolutely clear, I was using the spray-on skin thing as an example of how using the newspaper the way you just did is an incredibly poor way to understand what's happening in a given regional center of an industry. I wasn't implying that that example was from Silicon Valley.
As with other people in this thread, I think your issue here is that one hears about things in their speculative research-study phase (when there's often still 95% of the work to be done for the findings to be actually used), and then lose interest and (somewhat subconsciously) stop classifying it as "innovation". You'll notice that when you do this, literally everything falls through the cracks between "vaporware" and "not interesting anymore and therefore not innovation". In a response to another commenter, I gave a more complete response (of off-the-top-of-my-head general examples): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8988431
EDIT: Ah haha, I just realized that your newspaper comment was in direct response to my allusion to a newspaper. The second paragraph of my comment is still relevant though. As an example, there was a cellular matrix spray that the military was investigating for immediate application to large open wounds which had FANTASTIC potential for promoting the healing process (by sealing things up a lot more quickly without foreign materials and thus lowering chance for infection by an INCREDIBLE amount, etc). Newspapers won't give you constant updates about (e.g.) every step of the process of bringing this to market, because the only way to add new information is to go into technical detail, which will turn off tons of readers.
That doesn't prevent you from seeing the story in the newspaper during its eye-catching vaporware phase, and then following it on your own after that. (Note that even this latter step is unnecessary if you have at least a decent ballpark of what percent of things like that never end up being feasible for actual usage).
EDIT2: To be absolutely clear, I was using the spray-on skin thing as an example of how using the newspaper the way you just did is an incredibly poor way to understand what's happening in a given regional center of an industry. I wasn't implying that that example was from Silicon Valley.