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by
Matt Ridley
Read between
June 25 - July 19, 2020
Innovation, like evolution, is a process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance – and that happen to be useful.
Innovation, then, means finding new ways to apply energy to create improbable things, and see them catch on.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps defines an innovation as ‘a new method or new product that becomes a new practice somewhere in the world’.
And here is my starting point: innovation is the most important fact about the modern world, but one of the least well understood.
for most of the innovations that changed people’s lives at least at first owed little to new scientific knowledge and few of the innovators who drove the changes were trained scientists.
Serendipity plays a big part in innovation, which is why liberal economies, with their free-roving experimental opportunities, do so well. They give luck a chance. Innovation happens when people are free to think, experiment and speculate.
What is the best way to encourage innovation? To set targets, direct research, subsidize science, write rules and standards; or to back off from all this, deregulate, set people free;
No economist or social scientist can fully explain why innovation happens, let alone why it happens when and where it does.
Not all the people whose stories I tell are heroes; some are frauds, fakers or failures. Few worked alone, for innovation is a team sport, a collective enterprise, far more than is generally recognized.
It cannot be easily predicted, as many a red-faced forecaster has discovered. It runs mostly on trial and error, the human version of natural selection.
And it was a gradual, stumbling change, with no eureka moment.
The professional boatmen took umbrage at this competition and destroyed the craft: Luddites before Ludd.
Yet at first it was a horribly inefficient device.
The Newcomen steam engine was the mother of the modern world, ushering in an era in which technology could begin to amplify the work of people into fantastic productivity, freeing more and more people from the drudgery of the plough,
Despite this example of patents getting in the way of improvement, as Savery’s had for Newcomen, Watt himself was an enthusiastic defender of his own patents, and Boulton was adept at using his political contacts to acquire long-lasting and broad patents on Watt’s various inventions.
But, hang on, didn’t Thomas Edison invent the light bulb? Yes, he did. But so did Marcellin Jobard in Belgium; and so did William Grove, Fredrick de Moleyns and Warren de la Rue (and Swan) in England. So too did Alexander Lodygin in Russia, Heinrich Göbel in Germany, Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin
Houdin in France, Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans in Canada, Hiram Maxim and John Starr in America, and several others.
The truth is that the story of the light bulb, far from illustrating the importance of the heroic inventor, turns out to tell the opposite story: of innovation as a gradual, incremental, collective yet inescapably inevitable process.
vanity: people prefer to be thought brilliant rather than merely hard-working.
Thomas Edison understood better than anybody before, and many since, that innovation is itself a product, the manufacturing of which is a team effort requiring trial and error.
In developing the nickel-iron battery his employees undertook 50,000 experiments. He stuffed his workshops with every kind of material, tool and book.
Yet in effect what he was doing was not invention, so much as innovation: turning ideas into practical, reliable and affordable reality.
The story of nuclear power is a cautionary tale of how innovation falters, and even goes backwards, if it cannot evolve.
The problem is simply that nuclear power is a technology ill-suited to the most critical of innovation practices: learning by doing.
Vaccination exemplifies a common feature of innovation: that use often precedes understanding.
Why include nets with holes in them? I asked Darriet recently. Because mosquito nets rarely remain intact for long in Africa, so it is realistic to study whether a torn net is as useless as nothing
But, remember, the inventor is not necessarily the innovator.
Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.
The story of the screw propeller shows all the usual elements of an innovation: a long prehistory, simultaneous breakthroughs by two rivals, then incremental evolution over many years.
‘The introduction [of an invention] is a time fraught with combating stupidity and jealousy, inertia and venom, furtive resistance and an open conflict of interests, an appalling time spent battling with people, a martyrdom to be overcome, even if the invention is a success.’ Yet,
We do not believe it will ever be a commercial vehicle at all,’ opined the Engineering Magazine.
As for prejudice, clergymen forbade their parishioners from eating potatoes in England as late as the early eighteenth century, for the magnificently stupid reason that they are not mentioned in the Bible.
both scientists and administrators typically replied, ‘Poverty is the farmers’ lot; they are used to it.’ I was informed that the farmers were proud of their lowly status, and was assured that they wanted no change. After my own experiences in Iowa and Mexico I didn’t believe a word of it.
Yet arguably neither of these huge American universities with their big budgets and luxurious laboratories deserve as much credit as they seek.
Perhaps the truth is that people like to think they too could become heroes with a single leap of imagination.
Such magical thinking is deeply misleading as to the character of most actual innovators.
But when Sadow took his crude prototype to retailers, one by one they turned him down. The objections were many and varied. Why add the weight of wheels to a suitcase when you could put it on a baggage trolley or hand it to a porter? Why add to the cost?
The lesson of wheeled baggage is that you often cannot innovate before the world is ready. And that when the world is ready, the idea will be already out there, waiting to be employed:
Innovation combines components in a new way’.
Morse’s claims for himself as an innovator rest most convincingly on the part of his work he valued least, his dogged entrepreneurship. With stubborn longing, he brought his invention into the marketplace despite congressional indifference, frustrating delays, mechanical failures, family troubles, bickering partners,
Had Marconi not lived, radio would still have come to life in the 1890s. Others such as Jagadish Chandra Bose in India, Oliver Lodge in Britain and Alexander Popov in Russia were doing and publishing experiments that used electromagnetic waves to create action at a distance, though not always for communication.
He created a web crawler to go from link to link, and soon had a database that ate up half of Stanford’s internet bandwidth. But the purpose was annotating the web, not searching it.
Their algorithm relied on the billions of human judgments made by people when they created links from their own websites. It was an automated way to tap into the wisdom of humans – in other words, a higher form of human–computer symbiosis.
‘Left to their own devices, personalization filters serve up a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas,
amplifying our desire for things that are familiar and leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.’
Most innovation consists of the non-random retention of variations in design.
‘This view of events stems from a profound Eurocentric bias and a failure to appreciate the depth and breadth of the African archaeological record.’
Dense populations inevitably spur human technological change, because they create the conditions in which people can specialize.
The startling idea here (as I argued in The Rational Optimist) is that some time before 150,000 years ago human beings had become reliant on a collective, social brain mediated through specialization and exchange. If you cut people off from exchange, you lower their chances of innovating.
