The Great Innovation Debate

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READING 1

Calling this "our generation's Sputnik moment" and a "time to win the future," Obama in his State of the Union address urged a renewed emphasis on innovation. "Now it's our turn," Obama told a joint session of Congress. We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world."

“…Yes, scientific innovation offers us a chance to achieve prosperity. It has offered us benefits that have improved our health and our lives — improvements that we take too easily for granted. But, it gives us something more. At root, science forces us to reckon with the truth as best we can ascertain it. Some truths fill us with awe, others force us to question long-held views. Science can’t answer every question, and indeed it seems at times the more we plumb the mysteries of the physical world the more humble we must be. Science cannot supplant our ethics, our values, our principles or our faith, but science can inform those things, and help put those values, these moral sentiments, that faith, can put those things to work — to feed a child, to heal the sick, to be good stewards of this Earth. We are reminded that with each new discovery and the new power it brings, comes new responsibility. That the fragility, the sheer specialness of life, requires us to move past our differences and to address our common problems, to endure, and continue humanity’s strivings for a better world.” Barack Obama

READING 2

THE GREAT INNOVATION DEBATE

Jan 12th 2013

The Economist

Fears that innovation is slowing are exaggerated, but governments need to help it along

WITH the pace of technological change making heads spin, we tend to think of our age as the most innovative ever. We have smartphones and supercomputers, big data and nanotechnologies, gene therapy and stem-cell transplants. Governments, universities and firms together spend around $1.4 trillion a year on R&D, more than ever before.

Yet nobody recently has come up with an invention half as useful as that depicted onthis page. With its clean lines and intuitive user interface, the humble loo transformed the lives of billions of people. And it wasn’t just modern sanitation that sprang from late-19th and early-20th-century brains: they produced cars, planes, the telephone, radio and antibiotics.

Modern science has failed to make anything like the same impact, and this is why a growing band of thinkers claim that the pace of innovation has slowed. Interestingly, the gloomsters include not just academics such as Robert Gordon, the American economist who offered the toilet test of un-inventiveness, but also entrepreneurs such as Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook.

If the pessimists are right, the implications are huge. Economies can generate growth by adding more stuff: more workers, investment and education. But sustained increases in output per person, which are necessary to raise incomes and welfare, entail using the stuff we already have in better ways—innovating, in other words. If the rate at which we innovate and spread that innovation slows down, so too, other things being equal, will our growth rate.

Doom, gloom and productivity figures

Ever since Malthus forecast that we would all starve, human ingenuity has proved the prophets of doom wrong. But these days the impact ofinnovation does indeed seem to be tailing off. Life expectancy in America, for instance, has risen more slowly since 1980 than in the early 20th century. The speed of travel, in the rich world at least, is often slower now than it was a generation earlier, after rocketing a century or so ago. According to Mr Gordon, productivity also supports the pessimists’ case: it took off in the mid-19th century, accelerated in the early 20th century and held up pretty well until the early 1970s. It then dipped sharply, ticked up in late 1990s with computerisation and dipped again in the mid-2000s.

Yet that pattern is not as conclusively gloomy as the doomsayers claim. Life expectancy is still improving, even in the rich world. The productivity gains after electrification came not smoothly, but in spurts; and the drop-off since 2004 probably has more to do with the economic crisis than with underlying lack of invention. Moreover, it is too early to write off the innovative impact of the present age.

This generation’s contribution to technological progress lies mostly in information technology (IT). Rather as electrification changed everything by allowing energy to be used far from where it was generated, computing and communications technologies transform lives and businesses by allowing people to make calculations and connections far beyond their unaided capacity. But as with electricity, companies will take time to learn how to use them, so it will probably be many decades before their full impact is felt.

Computing power is already contributing to dramatic advances far beyond the field of IT. Three-dimensional printing may cause a new industrial revolution. Autonomous vehicles, like the driverless cars produced by Google, could be common on streets within a decade. The performance of human prosthetics is rapidly catching up with that of natural limbs.

And although it is too soon to judge how big a deal these inventions will turn out to be, globalisation should make this a fruitful period for innovation. Many more brains are at work now than were 100 years ago: American and European inventors have been joined in the race to produce cool new stuff by Japanese, Brazilian, Indian and Chinese ones.

Spend a penny—or two

So there are good reasons for thinking that the 21st century’s innovative juices will flow fast. But there are also reasons to watch out for impediments. The biggest danger is government.

When government was smaller, innovation was easier. Industrialists could introduce new processes or change a product’s design without a man from the ministry claiming some regulation had been broken. It is a good thing that these days pharmaceuticals are stringently tested and factory emissions controlled. But officialdom tends to write far more rules than are necessary for the public good; and thickets of red tape strangle innovation. Even many regulations designed to help innovation are not working well. The West’s intellectual-property system, for instance, is a mess, because it grants too many patents of dubious merit.

The state has also notably failed to open itself up to innovation. Productivity is mostly stagnant in the public sector. Unions have often managed to prevent governments even publishing the performance indicators which, elsewhere, have encouraged managers to innovate. There is vast scope for IT to boost productivity in health care and education, if only those sectors were more open to change.

The rapid growth in the rich world before the 1970s was encouraged by public spending on infrastructure (including in sewage systems) and basic research: the computer, the internet and the green revolution in food technology all sprang out of science, where there was no immediate commercial aim. Wars provide the sharpest example of the innovative power of government spending: astounding new developments in drone and prosthetic technology—let alone the jet engine—are a bittersweet testament to that. Even in these straitened times, money should still be found for basic research into areas such as carbon capture and storage.

For governments that do these things well—get out of the way of entrepreneurs, reform their public sectors and invest wisely—the rewards could be huge. The risk that innovation may slow is a real one, but can be avoided. Whether it happens or not is, like most aspects of mankind’s fate, up to him.

READING 3

ONWARDS AND UPWARDS

Dec 17th 2009 the Economist

Why is the modern view of progress so impoverished?

In the rich world the idea of progress has become impoverished. Through complacency and bitter experience, the scope of progress has narrowed. The popular view is that, although technology and GDP advance, morals and society aretreading water or, depending on your choice of newspaper, sinking back into decadence and barbarism. On the left of politics these days, “progress” comes with a pair of ironic quotation marks attached; on the right, “progressive” is a term of abuse.

The idea of progress forms the backdrop to a society. In the extreme, without the possibility of progress of any sort, your gain is someone else’s loss. If human behaviour is unreformable, social policy can only ever be about trying to cage the ape within. Society must in principle be able to move towards its ideals, such as equality and freedom, or they are no more than cant and self-delusion. So it matters if people lose their faith in progress. And it is worth thinking about how to restore it.

Modern science is full of examples of technologies that can be used for ill as well as good. Think of nuclear power—and of nuclear weapons; of biotechnology—and of biological contamination. Or think, less apocalyptically, of information technology and of electronic surveillance. History is full of useful technologies that have done harm, intentionally or not. Electricity is a modern wonder, but power stations have burnt too much CO2-producing coal. The internet has spread knowledge and understanding, but it has also spread crime and pornography. German chemistry produced aspirin and fertiliser, but it also filled Nazi gas chambers with Cyclon B.

The point is not that science is harmful, but that progress in science does not map tidily onto progress for humanity. In an official British survey of public attitudes to science in 2008, just over 80% of those asked said they were “amazed by the achievements of science”. However, only 46% thought that “the benefits of science are greater than any harmful effect”.

From the perspective of human progress, science needs governing. Scientific progress needs to be hitched to what you might call “moral progress”. It can yield untold benefits, but only if people use it wisely. They need to understand how to stop science from being abused. And to do that they must look outside science to the way people behave.

READING 4

SMARTER PLANET

December, 19th 2011

Steve Hamm

Every year IBM predicts the future of technology via the IBM 5 in 5 initiative–our forecast of five innovations that will help transform aspects of modern life, making the planet smarter, within the next five years. We assess not just the availability of a new technology but also the likelihood of its large-scale adoption.

This year’s predictions:

·People power will come to life

·You will never need a password again

·Mind reading is no longer science fiction

·The digital divide will cease to exist

·Junk mail will become priority mail

Making this kind of prediction is difficult. (In fact, to me, sadly, the one about eliminating the digital divide seems impossible.) So, every year, IBM researchers stick out their necks. Which is risky. “A lot of people wait for things to happen. It’s rare than an organization says: this is a big change, and it’s coming,” says IBM Fellow Bernard Meyerson.

Why do they do it? In addition to the PR value, we complete this exercise annually because it makes IBMers think hard about what’s possible and to strive to make it so. Simply put, the process of choosing the predictions and defending them is good for us.

Meyerson, who plays a role in the annual exercise, says the most useful thing about the process is that it requires IBMers to think holistically about innovation. They can’t consider science and technology in a vacuum. They also have to think deeply about social trends, market conditions the willingness of people to pay for cutting-edge technologies. That’s the kind of thinking that can transform inventions into high-impact innovations.

We’ve been issuing the Next 5 in 5 predictions for the past six years. So, how are we doing? Mindful of the difficulty, and considering the fact that for most of the predictions less than five years have passed, we’ve done pretty well.

Two of the first year’s predictions, for instance, have pretty much come true:

We will be able to access healthcare remotely from just about anywhere in the world. Today, through telemedicine, patients can connect with physicians or specialists from just about anywhere via inexpensive computers and broadband networks. Doctors can view x-rays and other diagnostic imagery from thousands of miles away.

Technologies the size of a few atoms will address areas of environmental importance. Nanotechnology is now used in countless fields and industries, including agriculture, biotechnology and sensor networks, enabling us to understand and interact with the natural environment like never before.

Predictions from other years have panned out as well. A couple of examples:

You will have a crystal ball for your health. Thanks to advances in genetic research and high-performance computing it is now possible to affordably decipher an individual’s entire genome. This makes it possible for physicians to alert people to medical conditions they might fall prey to, and it clears the pathway, eventually, to truly personal medicine.

You will talk to the Web…and the Web will talk back. Today, speech recognition and mobile communications technologies make it possible for people to talk to the Internet using their computers or mobile phones, be understood, and listen to automated voices that are responsive to their needs.

The Next 5 in 5 initiative got its start in an IBM Innovation Jam in 2006. The seed goal was to get the entire company thinking about grand challenges. “If you give people a grand challenge you push them to really innovate,” says Meyerson. “That’s when extraordinary things can happen.”

IBM has played a significant role in each of these breakthroughs. So, it’s working.

READING 5

COMPUTERS AND TECHNOLOGY

Has the present lived up to the expectations of the past? Throughout the ages people have tried to predict what life in the twenty-first century would be like. Many science-fiction writers did manage to predict the influence the computer would have on our world. Some even imagined that it would take over our lives, develop a personality, and turn on its creators.

To some extent they were right, especially when it comes to children and cyberaddiction. One constant prediction was that, thanks to computers and machines, the time devoted to labour would diminish. Even in 1971, in his book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler envisaged a society awash with 'free time'. The author noted that time at work had been cut in half since the turn of the previous century and wrongly speculatedthat it would be cut in half again by 2000.

However, our gadget-filled homes are a tribute to the various visions of the future: the microwave oven, internet fridges with ice-cube dispensers, freezers, video monitors, climate control, dishwashers, washing machines, personal computers, wireless connections and cupboards full of instant food. These may no longer be considered cutting-edgebut they have matched, if not surpassed, visions of how we would live. The domestic robot never quite happened, but if you can phone ahead to set the heating and use a remote control to operate the garage door, they may as well be redundant.

The car, of course, has failed to live up to our expectations. It has been given turbo engines, DVD players and automatic windows, but its tyres stick stubbornly to the road. Why doesn't it take off? The past promised us a flying car in various guises. In 1947 a prototypecircled San Diego for more than an hour but later crashed in the desert. Some 30 patents for flying cars were registered in the US patent office last century but none of these ideas has been transformed into a commercially available vehicle.

At least communication technology in this digitalage hasn't let us down. Even in the most remote areas people have access to some form of communication device. The introduction of the telephone last century changed our world, but today's mobile phones and the virtualworld of the Internet have revolutionised it.

READING 6: SUMMARISING

THE FUTURE IS NOW

By Joel Achenbach

April 13, 2008;The Washington Post

The most important things happening in the world today won't make tomorrow's front page. They won't get mentioned by presidential candidates or Chris Matthews or Bill O'Reilly or any of the other folks yammering and snorting on cable television. They'll be happening in laboratories -- out of sight, inscrutable and unhyped until the very moment when they change life as we know it.