{"id":1376,"date":"2012-07-06T18:15:11","date_gmt":"2012-07-06T18:15:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/?p=1376"},"modified":"2015-05-08T18:03:58","modified_gmt":"2015-05-08T18:03:58","slug":"innovation-a-dirty-sloppy-timeconsuming-and-unfair-process","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journal.c2er.org\/2012\/07\/innovation-a-dirty-sloppy-timeconsuming-and-unfair-process\/","title":{"rendered":"Innovation: A Dirty, Sloppy, Time-consuming and Unfair Process"},"content":{"rendered":"

Innovation is Great but shouldn’t our innovation strategies be realistic, not Pollyanna-like?<\/span><\/h3>\n

Innovation is very real and very important to long term economic development, not to mention\u00a0human evolution. The Curmudgeon sincerely believes that. As a short term economic revitalization strategy, however, innovation has become\u00a0a buzz word–a solution for everything and every community.\u00a0Want to innovate–Great, just take this course, join my accelerator or mentor group, or try this absolutely surefire new technology or technique and off you go. Everybody\u00a0can do it.\u00a0 Innovate today\u00a0and watch the world be transformed tomorrow. The word has been reduced to meaninglessness–and the so-called innovations themselves, ranging from expensive and useless “apps” to changing the color of your iPhone is hawked as the road to prosperity and a new Third Wave world.<\/p>\n

OMG–have I become a grumpy old Luddite (look that one up with your innovative google search)?<\/p>\n

Sorry, I’m not that smart (those Luddites were right, you know). But I have too much respect for innovation and a heck of a lot of\u00a0worry about its good-AND BAD\u00a0consequences– and the unanticipated, and often destructive, paths it frequently takes.\u00a0Innovation should be respected (as if we respect anything these days) and should not\u00a0be treated so blithely. So I offer to the reader a relatively short (all right, not all that short)\u00a0observation focused upon a couple of features pertinent to\u00a0innovation\u00a0\u00a0 (rename it “invention” ), drawn from the Great Innovation or the early days of the Industrial Revolution.<\/p>\n

Since hindsight is always better than looking into the future, this review goes back to the good old days of yesteryear\u00a0when innovation was innovation and creativity, well… was dirty, sloppy, time consuming, serendipitous, grossly unfair and not very heroic: the days of the Industrial Revolution (1750-1850). Our comments, drawn from a couple of notable histories of that time period, offer a realistic glimpse into how the knowledge creation and innovation diffusion process actually played out during the\u00a0Industrial Revolution. Warning! It wasn’t quick and it wasn’t pretty and plenty of things went wrong? Oh and by the way, those great innovators, inventors, well maybe they weren’t all that we make them out to be.<\/p>\n

The Curmudgeon is hoping that the reader will contrast that messy, time-consuming,\u00a0sometimes cruel and grossly unfair process described below with the images of many current blogs,\u00a0magazine articles,\u00a0and public policy initiatives that assert innovation is satisfying, wondrous to watch, always pleasant, scrupulously fair process led by brilliant genius entrepreneurs who creatively develop new technologies, products and services\u00a0chiefly because\u00a0such entrepreneurs operate in an facilitative, exciting, no-holds barred knowledge-based, knowledge-diffusing world created by governmental and university-led policies implemented by creative economic developers–such initiatives\u00a0which lead, without doubt or pause, to a new age with plentiful high-paying jobs for all and, of course, prosperity.<\/p>\n

YEA Right! Who Are You Kidding?<\/span><\/p>\n

The Curmudgeon wishes such a world would or even could exist. Instead he believes innovation is facilitated by desperation and greed–neither of which is very pretty. Also innovation isn’t something that creates jobs in an instant. The job creation effects of innovation take a heck of a long time and today nobody ever even hints that some innovation actually kills jobs. In real life innovation kills plenty of jobs and often replaces them with machines. As for entrepreneurism, its not for everybody and when you look at actual innovation through hindsight, it is far from clear what you can teach someone about it. In essence, innovation is real and it is important–but is it really a strategy that economic developers at the sub-state level can expect will turn around their community in relatively short order?<\/p>\n

Third Wave? Sure! This Time Really Is Different: Every Blather Needs a Good Tangent and this is it!<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The Industrial Revolution! 1750-1850 are you kidding Curmudgeon! We are in\u00a0a new age, Curmudgeon,\u00a0a post-industrial age, a third wave age (burp!). What can we possibly learn from the dinosaurs of the 19th century?<\/p>\n

The Curmudgeon separates himself from those who think of our present epoch as a \u201cnew age\u201d, a \u201cthird wave\u201d, a \u201cpost-industrial society\u201d. To those who hold such a perspective, the historical past can offer little insight into what lies ahead. For them, we have entered a brave new world. Unfortunately, there is a tendency with these new age proponents to assert that they alone can define this new world and that they alone have the instruction manual, the road map. This new “world is flat”, they assert, and it has evolved to the point there is little to be learned from the past. The winners are those who leave the past and best understand the new opportunities of the new epoch. History is irrelevant–strip it from the STEM curriculum.<\/p>\n

To this the Curmudgeon intelligently and coherently, but firmly, replies \u201cBull-doo-doo\u201d.\u00a0 This Time is Different is the best indicator there is of an innovation\u00a0“bubble”–a bubble\u00a0spasming out\u00a0 buzz words and magic bullet solutions\u00a0for instant prosperity. As we all know, trees, like innovation\u00a0grow to the skies and never fall (knock down electric lines, catch blight, or burn)–Right? Come on!<\/p>\n

Step back for an instant. Give some thought as to what this innovation thing really entails.\u00a0\u00a0How\u00a0many decades does\u00a0it take before demand and new technology permit successful commercialization? What is the real “stuff” required of entrepreneurs if they are to ultimately succeed–can you really teach how to steal\u00a0someone else’s\u00a0widget and get historical credit for\u00a0an invention you didn’t pioneer?\u00a0And is innovation\u00a0so smooth and quick and so easy to achieve–a “plug and play”\u00a0creativity and knowledge-diffusion process which is guaranteed\u00a0to produce innovation and enhanced productivity which never kills jobs, occupations, sectors\u00a0and ruins lives and lifestyles\u00a0or recreates the social-economic class structure so that future Marx’s have something to write about.<\/p>\n

So the Curmudgeon believes our present age, our current\u00a0society and the global economy is still safely contained within the Industrial Revolution era. How can he believe that when so much has changed? Well, one early industrial revolution\u00a0invention was the railroad–and now Richard Florida in his Great Reset is talking about High-Speed Rail as the driver of growth in the new age! It seems to the Curmudgeon that the industrial revolution invention, the combustion engine, is now being rejiggered to nat gas and that is called\u00a0“alternative\u00a0energy” and is a gazelle cluster. Yea, sure, the industrial revolution is\u00a0so “24 seconds ago”.<\/p>\n

The Industrial Revolution, even through it started hundreds of years ago, is still\u00a0churning and evolving, and glimpsing into its early features\u00a0can offer insight into what innovation and knowledge-diffusion really\u00a0looks like. Back then you could have read this article on reproduction from a lithograph printer; today you digitally download it–and possibly print it out on a laser printer. Kind of takes your breath away, how far we’ve come (sarcasm!)?<\/p>\n

The Curmudgeon believes,\u00a0our\u00a0present economy\u00a0is just a\u00a0phase in an on-going Industrial Revolution. (Paul Bairoch now with IHS Global Insight, writing for the Financial Times, says we are in the seventh period-June 11, 2012). Factories still make semiconductor chips and cell phones and software shops still manufacture apps.\u00a0Obviously the industrial revolution has evolved\u00a0from its earliest fascination with water power, textile manufacturing, and locomotives driven on wooden rails–but\u00a0our economies still revolve around goods made, even if the cutting edge of goods are digital rather than material (Bairoch calls this last period “the new industrial revolution”–a not very imaginative label, the Curmudgeon observes).<\/p>\n

To be sure, the current phase of this, rather long in the tooth, Industrial\u00a0Revolution,\u00a0is much less factory-based, than information and service-based, and is more focused on communication technologies. But cell phones and Internet to the contrary,\u00a0our economy\u00a0is\u00a0still based upon the science, the scientific method\u00a0and technology first unleashed by Newton, Bacon\u00a0and\u00a0their ilk, and manufacturing, be it advanced or low wage, is still regarded as the critical enabler and\u00a0beneficiary of technology, creativity\u00a0and innovation.<\/p>\n

We can learn from lessons\u00a0drawn from\u00a0the Industrial Revolution And as to any brave new Third Wave world–the Curmudgeon proudly\u00a0proclaims that his GPS\u00a0gets him lost every time, but he does\u00a0know a couple of\u00a0historians you can read\u00a0who do possess a firm sense of how\u00a0the original Industrial Revolution first played out and may broaden your perspective about how amenable innovation and knowledge diffusion is to plug and play programs and strategies.<\/p>\n

Diffusing Knowledge\u00a0From The Past<\/h2>\n

Stealing from these two\u00a0insightful\u00a0historians, listed below,\u00a0we will return to yesteryear when innovation was king and knowledge was diffused–without the Internet, the iPhone or the incubator.<\/p>\n

(1) The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy<\/strong>, Joel Mokyr, Princeton University Press, 2004, (2) The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World, 1776-1914<\/strong>, Gavin Weightman, Grove Press, 2007.<\/p>\n

Anyway, the two books are quite different in their approach and content. Most academics would not be likely to link one with the other. Weightman’s book, in fact,\u00a0is probably considered soft, or popular history (it is pleasurable to read and therefore cannot be considered sufficiently rigorous for academic publication).\u00a0Mokyr is concerned with basic<\/span> knowledge<\/span>, how it was discovered<\/span> and how it was transformed into applied knowledge<\/span> during the first\u00a0two hundred plus years of the Industrial Revolution. The incredibly long and complicated time span between knowledge discovery, successful commercialization which allowed the knowledge to become the engine of economic growth which he retells can today, no doubt, be shortened by that weekend workshop and crowd-sourcing, and really good marketing.<\/p>\n

Weightman, on the other hand, is focused on the personalities and life stories of the key innovators and entrepreneurs who seized upon this knowledge and converted it into innovations and technologies<\/span> \u2014 the process we today label commercialization. The stories focused on key inventions and innovations\u00a0are quite complicated and the key inventions take years before the\u00a0various\u00a0pieces are put together. The real life serendipity of real life people (oftentimes very strange, obsessive people)\u00a0strikes the Curmudgeon as an excellent counter to the one way street to inevitable success we find so prevalent in the literature today.Many of the poor souls who really created and invented died broke and disillusioned. In no discernible way do we see magic bullets,\u00a0 Great Resets, or anything approaching a linear, rational straight line evolution from creativity, to knowledge diffusion, to innovation, to commercialization and onward to\u00a0jobs and prosperity.These two works offer us a useful reminder of how disjointed, messy and lengthy is the cycle from knowledge discovery to successful commercial application, to actual economic growth. Also, they offer a realistic appreciation of the role \u201cGreat Men\u201d play in innovation and commercialization. Finally, Mokyr and Weightman can restore meaning to the world \u201cinnovation\u201d which in today\u2019s literature has been warped and woofed into meaninglessness.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mokyr\u00a0concentrates on\u00a0the rather fragile link between basic research and applied research. He tells a tale (without really meaning to, the Curmudgeon thinks) of how inventions (what we today call technology) sput and sputter from basic research to applied research and then ooze into multiple, unintended, eventual commercialisation, very often in totally unrelated fields or sectors. A key issue is that as basic knowledge moves toward its evolution into applied knowledge it can shift to completely different academic disciplines, it can stall for considerable periods of time awaiting the development of new technologies and knowledge (for instance, the railroad\u00a0steam-boiler engine, being too heavy for the wooden railroad ties, needed to wait twenty years for the Bessemer steel production to evolve. The two quite separate technologies\u00a0combined \u00a0as iron and steel replaced the wooden ties and allowed the heavy, but creative and innovative steam boilers to be loaded on the locomotive. Then Weightman tells us the story of how additional delays, and treachery followed as financing and competition for contracts further befouled the successful introduction of the technology.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In summary, Mokyr uncovers, in some cases multi century, gaps between the discovery of \u201cuseful\u201d knowledge, its commercial application, and its triggering of economic growth and jobs. \u00a0To explain this almost inevitable gap he\u00a0observes there is a\u00a0need for a required intermediate stage. This intermediate stage between discovery, commercialization and subsequent economic growth is necessary because\u00a0discovered knowledge\u00a0 must be broken down into into bits and pieces,\u00a0\u00a0applicable to specific inventions useful to a specific\u00a0industry sectors,\u00a0and then linked with other related technologies.\u00a0Only\u00a0at this\u00a0point, assuming\u00a0sufficient demand exists, can an entrepreneur-commercialization put together\u00a0the financing, and the marketing, and the\u00a0cost-minimizing productivity\u00a0that permits links the product to end-user.<\/p>\n

Crucial to the intermediate stage is access (diffusion) to the knowledge and information by anyone who thinks they can use it ,\u00a0often through what today we would call \u201csocial networks\u201d and occasionally through venture capitalists who link seemingly unrelated innovations and technologies to a business plan. Successful commercial innovation requires use of multiple inventions and innovations usually drawn from sectors and sources unrelated to the final\u00a0product.\u00a0Because of this leap frogging across industry sectors,\u00a0 the need to combine innovations and inventions, and the time gestation necessary to create demand–the prerequisite for the availability of financing, INNOVATION IS UNPREDICTABLE, EVOLUTIONARY, SUBJECT TO FALSE STARTS, AND SPASMS OF PROGRESS, and often FOLLOWED BY INITIAL COMMERCIAL FAILURE.<\/p>\n

At its best, innovation does not reliably produce short term<\/span> profits, jobs, or economic growth. Innovation and entrepreneurship is resistant to rational positive action and\u00a0planning. Innovation’s cemeteries are filled with inventors who died alone, broke and unknown because the potential of their innovation\u00a0was successfully commercialized\u00a0years after their death. Buried alongside these unknown innovators are\u00a0investors who “picked winners”and who also\u00a0died\u00a0penniless and unknown.<\/p>\n

Great Men (and Women) With Great Ideas: The Hero Entrepreneur<\/h2>\n

At this point Weightman takes over. As he describes the path of several\u00a0“platform technologies” (such as steam engine,\u00a0combustion engine, the mobile combustion engine (railroad engine), steel,\u00a0 petroleum as an energy source, cars, torpedoes, and plastics) he recounts the lives of the key innovators-entrepreneurs and the various problems and opportunities they encountered. Invariably, a good idea of concept required a working model, financing, simultaneous competition with other ideas and concepts, including copies of his own (often illicitly stolen) and then near\u00a0insane period we today label commercialization in which the product innovator becomes distinctly weird,\u00a0obsessive, egocentric and immoral–and usually results in someone other than the innovator making the real\u00a0money. A reader of today’s\u00a0literature on innovation and entrepreneurism gets\u00a0little\u00a0feel for this very brutal, lengthy, unfair, and oft times immoral process which has so many twists and turns, detours and serendipity that one has to wonder how an professor teaching a course in innovation can possibly prepare his\u00a0student for what lies ahead. In the world of Weightman in particular, innovation, diffusion of knowledge, and commercialization is a world with:<\/p>\n