Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 74! How to Reinvent the Wheel But Different...
Good morning fellow enacters of emergent novel differences!
This week we went to Washington. It sounds very dramatic – and certainly being in the “neighborhood” that is the political capital is dramatic – stark, neo-classical, imperial and of an overwhelming scale.
We were there to speak at a conference that brings together government, science/academia and industry on questions of innovation and impact. The full panel discussuon and Iain's presentation begin at 4h59m17s.
It was interesting and frankly quite astonishing to hear organization after organization get up and talk about the importance of innovation and how they really get innovation to happen. Organizations ranging from major universities to DARPA detailing how they approach the production and support of radical and transformative innovation:
Each and every one of these organizations talked about the importance of “impact”, “product-market fit”, getting to market quickly, needing to find VC capital, and entrepreneurial “talent” to commercialize new technologies – all of which made us really skeptical – do any of these methods actually lead to radical innovation?
(Just as an aside – you know you are in a room deep in hubris when the representative from DARPA claims that they invented the internet. We all know that it was Al Gore… )
The question we need to ask is, “are any of these approaches actually helpful in developing transformative or disruptive innovation?”
Just a few weeks ago the journal Nature published a really interesting article on this question: “Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time” (by Michael Park, Erin Leahey & Russell J. Funk). The gist of the article is that their research shows that the rate of radical innovation has markedly lessened since the 1940’s. Here is what they say:
“Recent decades have witnessed exponential growth in the volume of new scientific and technological knowledge, thereby creating conditions that should be ripe for major advances. Yet contrary to this view, studies suggest that progress is slowing in several major fields. …We analyze these claims at scale across six decades, using data… that characterizes how papers and patents change networks of citations in science and technology. We find that papers and patents are increasingly less likely to break with the past in ways that push science and technology in new directions. This pattern holds universally across fields and is robust across multiple different citation- and text-based metrics.”
It is an astonishing claim, and they go onto detail why they think that it is a structural issue and not one that we have somehow objectively exhausted the possibility for genuinely new disruptive discoveries/inventions (it is worth a close read).
What do their conclusions mean? To put it simply, what we are doing in the extended spaces of academic research is antithetical to radical innovation – our practices are actually anti-innovative.
At the conference we articulated this, but, based upon what we had heard in the prior session, we felt we need to phrase it even stronger so we put it this way:
“What does this mean for us here today in this room?
Being provocative, and asking you to be humble… it means most likely that what we are all doing in the name of fostering radical innovation is hindering radical innovation.”
Here is the thing that we have realized about innovation – it is not all the same, and the techniques that work for one form will not work for another – in fact they will undermine the other.
Beginning simply we can say that with innovation there are two broad connected categories: there is incremental or developmental innovation and there is a more radical or disruptive innovation (see above).
What everyone from DARPA to the universities and industries present were proposing were strategies for developmental innovation – while claiming they were effective strategies for disruptive innovation.
And the problem is that the strategies that are very effective at developmental innovation are also very effective at undermining the possibility of radical innovation happening.
How so? Here is one of the examples we presented at the conference – the invention of the internet. We chose this primarily because of DARPA’s involvement in the conference where they claimed in an earlier presentation that they had invented the internet. Nothing could be further from the truth. DARPA did play a number of important roles in the development of the internet – but they certainly did not invent it – ultimately no one did (but that's getting ahead of the story).
What DARPA developed (based on international work that emerged in a highly distributed manner) was a closed physically distributed computer network with four nodes. Other similar systems were being developed internationally. For computing this was a challenge but conceptually it was not a radical departure from other communication systems – it was certainly not a new radical and transformative world making event.
If DARPA had then applied the innovation strategies they proposed at the conference (that all the new technologies the Department of Defense does not “pull forward” DARPA would push to commercialize seeking “product-market fit.”) – and had it worked where they achieved product market fit, we would have ended up with a series of closed communication systems being commercialized – interesting products but not anything like the thing we now call the internet.
Yes, “the internet” comes from what DARPA (and others) worked on – but it did not come out of it in any linear fashion. – It is an emergent outcome of a process by which unintended affordances joined with other logics into a rich self-organizing complex ecosystem that came to have its own emergent agency. The emergent “internet” is something genuinely emergent that is irreducible to any one causal relation.
In hindsight we can now see the internet as “obvious” – but it is important to remember that, as something radically novel and emergent, it was ontologically unknowable in advance of its emergence.
The invention of the wheel provides an even more telling example of these paradoxes and conundrums of innovation.
The irony is that the wheel was first invented as something trivial – a small aspect of toys. And it is only in its reinvention (really in its re-re-reinvention) that it became the disruptive innovation – “The Wheel” that we all talk about today as the sine qua non of innovation. (Here we see another example of exaptation – of our wing story).
It seems that the first wheels were on toys as secondary features. And in most locations they never evolved into anything else (wheels afterall have only few natural environments where they can be successful for human transportation without a lot of work on infrastructure).
The wheel that went on to become the wheel of the first great movement/transportation revolution most likely began its (second?) life by being exapted into part of a mining operation in the mountains of modern day Slovenia.
There it was small and most likely ran on rails in tunnels to move ore carts pulled or pushed by people. (The "train-rail" system came long before the "cart-land" system – which in itself is quite interesting).
It was only later that new unintended affordances were established exaptively by experimentally developing new assemblages (the steppes + wheel + axle + box + animal+ connection system, etc.). And from this a radically disruptive world co-emerged (there are two great books on this: Richard Bulliet's "The Wheel: Inventions and Reinventions", and “The Horse, the Wheel and Language” by David Anthony).
We see this logic repeat in many (most/all?) qualitatively disruptive innovations such as our example with DARPA and the internet. Another good example of this is the invention of penicillin and the emergence of Antibiotics – a truly disruptive innovation (which we go into in some detail in Volume 62).
Alexander Flemming did discover and stabilize the first fungi strains that eventually were creatively developed into antibiotics which went onto revolutionize health etc. But Flemming and his team thought very little initially of this fungi and their published report at the time suggested that it would be most useful in isolating bacteria for research. It was only others, over a decade later, that utilized their research to go in a new direction – and then it still took many further twists and turns and exaptive reinventions to become “penicillin”.
One of the keys to innovation is understanding both the differences between qualitatively disruptive and incremental forms of innovation and that their respective techniques are antithetical. But it is not enough to stop there, the incremental is always haunted by the possibility of being pushed into radical novelty – and this path is perhaps the most common path of innovation: the thing exists – whether it is the wheel, the computing protocols, or the fungi – it has been invented as an incremental variation – but it is always awaiting the possibility of being swept away on a far more radical threshold crossing journey of exaptation and emergence…
Well, that's all for this week – let's keep reinventing that which is there, but does not yet exist!
Till Volume 75,
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
We’re How You Innovate
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