The final post of a #ReadWithMe series on Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works
If Matt Ridley is right, and “most innovation consists of the non-random retention of variations in design”, shall we really care about innovation? If innovation comes out of a largely random process, how can we control, plan, help it?
There is a substantial industry of “fostering innovation”, both in government and its advisors and private consultants and private managers, too. They tend to frame innovation as something which is in the hands of producers, of makers. Producers, makers, inventors are certainly a big part of it: but so are customers, users who produce feedback and help in fine tuning ideas and applications. In other words, it is a mistake to consider innovation as the output of a process of “intelligent design”: it comes out of a process of selection, in which the contrivances of designers survive not because they are“good” or “ambitious” or “radical” but because they proved to be “useful”.
Failure in designing and fostering innovation is proved by the fact, Ridley argues, we are closer to an innovation famine than to an innovation plenty. Peter Thiel popularized the idea that we are very innovative in bits, not so much so with atoms. Ridley agrees. In recent years we achieved momentous changes in information technology, not so much elsewhere.
Ridley does not blame the complacency and stagnation only on the private sector. “Multinationals have absorbed the mentality of planners, rather than entrepreneurs”. One common theme in his book is the idea that innovation tends to start small, and is often pursued by smaller companies, by outsiders. “Big companies are bad at innovating, because they are too bureaucratic”.
In its essence, Ridley believes there is a tinkering, artisanal element in innovation. But he also maintains that successful innovation requires, on the part of the producer, an agility and flexibility which are often absent in bigger organizations.
This puts him literally at the opposite pole from some of the conventional wisdom on the matter. Lots of people think innovation needs big money, great corporate structures or great government structures also in order to administer competitive bids and somehow “foster” private entrepreneurship, and plenty of capital to endure if an idea is not immediately profitable.
What’s the key difference, between this vision and Ridley’s? I would answer with a word: “directionality”. Ridley believes innovation “happens”. Others believe the course of development can be shaped by decisive action. You need somebody in charge, to “direct” efforts towards a certain goal. Ridley would respond that this way you are likely to lose at least as many opportunities as you purportedly gain.
How Innovation Works is a refreshing read. It is a book about innovation as we knew it, not as we wished it. Of course the future can always be different from the past, yet perhaps it is worth considering the past and its lessons, if we can spot them.
Links to the previous posts on this series are here.
READER COMMENTS
Michael Pettengill
Aug 24 2020 at 3:50pm
The quote is contrary to what my dad told me. Yes, he commented that he saw dramatic changes in transportation: he was the first in the family to privately buy a car (his dad had a company car to peddle to country stores cutting off meat from beef and pork quarters in the trunk). But he also saw the same revolution in communication from only face-to-face and government first class mail and newspapers, then radio, telephone, then TV, then long distance telephone, then all the ways music and then video was transmitted, 35 mm film, then 16mm, then 8mm, 78s, LPs, 8-tracks, CDs, VHS, email. He died before DVDs, streaming audio, much less streaming video, but not before his peers were into BBS and AOL, though he never got into that, but he saw my brother, just an average joe worker, get into computer online stuff. He knew I was doing things unimaginable when he was a kid, except in pulp scifi and comics.
Thiel is biased to reject everything that requires paying workers to produce all the innovation in film which turned a very limited audience technology into mass market by paying hundreds of thousands of skilled workers delivering movies in theaters to innovations allowing skilled individuals to eventually unskilled individuals making home movies, but requiring a hidden thousands of Kodak workers processing film. The pace of change in “movies” was very fast, but generally forgotten today.
Phil H
Aug 25 2020 at 10:12am
“In recent years we achieved momentous changes in information technology, not so much elsewhere.”
I understood this argument when it was made in the noughts, but the last decade has beet materially transformative in a number of ways. Most obviously, touch screens and drones. Biological manipulation is now incredible, too: prosthetics, fake skin, fake meat. And for transport, check out high speed rail, now available to a fifth of the world in China.
I’m now quietly confident that the claims of an innovation slowdown are wildly exaggerated. Quite likely we’ll see some dramatic advances in the 2020s that will make clear what’s been brewing.
JK Brown
Aug 25 2020 at 11:12am
There is a 1986 talk at Bellcore by Richard Hamming, “You and your Research” that delves into how research ideas are developed, etc., that lead to innovations
That seems to indicate an organization can create an environment for the properly curious but the exact innovation to come out of it is a bit random. That organizations innovate, but their bureaucracy keeps them from exploiting the innovation, is legendary: Kodak and digital cameras, Xerox PARC and the graphical user interface, etc.
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