I have been thinking more about innovation as I’ve written the two essays on the history of warfarin. In those essays, I consider the nature of the narratives that report, or carry, the history of warfarin. As I work on my next essay on warfarin, I am looking at how choice of details affects the perception of “what happens.” My premise is that it is the perceptions derived from innovation narratives that underlie policy claims for how government or law should support innovation, or what it is inventors do, and the role of universities and others in all of this. That is, policy makers are not “in the flow” of innovation themselves, and rely on what they take to be plausible, if not canonical, accounts of innovation to inform their arguments. In this, my premise goes, simplifying selection of key events and relationships carries more impact in policy formation than reports of experience from practicing inventors, entrepreneurs, and investigators.
We might observe that yes, inventors, entrepreneurs, and investigators, along with investors, lawyers, and executives, are able to miss details, too, and to repeat what they have heard as much as consider (or be willing to give voice to) what they experienced. It’s not everyone who has the candor of Karl Paul Link to spread the credit around. But there is not a single short narrative of warfarin that preserves his statements of credit, even though he gives them the place of honor in his account, and even though his account specifies what each materially did–motivate the change in lab direction (“MORE DEAD COWS!”), isolate the substance, characterize it, synthesize it, produce many variations, test these, find others that work better, figure better ways to produce those. World success.
There is no university IP policy that states outright: “Historically, talented and dedicated students working together in teams distributed over time offer a tremendous prospect for changing the world through new technology. Therefore, it is our policy to provide resources to those faculty who excel at instructing, recruiting, directing, and motivating student talent in research and outreach activities.” Doesn’t exist.
We might think it a topic for a comedy movie, of a set of officials in the 17th century who establish policy for voyages of discovery by reading sailing stories, or, better, reading statistical studies of sailing stories. Then creating policies about what they want the ships to bring back in their holds, rather than the qualities of the captains or the crews or ships or landfalls. Everything that’s needed for good policy–or that can be justified for inclusion in good policy–will be drawn in the absence of anything else from short pithy narratives of success. That is, worse than life imitating art, policy demands life imitate bad art. Perhaps a dark comedy.
As I’ve worked through this, I have been also been thinking about history. Here’s a proposition I have come to. The study of history–as distinct from perfunctory recitation of a canonical story–works to undo technology abstraction. That is, a description of a technology shorn of its history loses a key set of qualifiers. Other qualifiers are also lost, in terms of limitations of use, questions as to claims, reasons for economic success, related consequences. Those qualifiers in turn are the connections of the technology with the society that has adopted it. It is these connections, I argue, that also point out key places where innovation is possible by showing other branches. In preparing a technology for instruction, breaking it into simple pieces, trimming off all but the most juicy of personal accounts, and using these only as fluff, a curriculum creates the conditions under which one might accept technology as fact and have no sense of the pathway it has come to be what it is, technically, socially, economically, and purposefully. As Jane Jacobs says about designed neighborhoods that conform to a uniform idea of “garden city” beauty, such abstracting is deeply *disorienting*. One loses one’s sense of place. As Jacobs puts it, “Blighted Dullness”. And that’s the sort of narrative we are building innovation policy on.
Put another way: history works to undo policy claims that we follow bad art. Or, more nearly, history challenges rationalizing narratives that aim to explain and exploit the status quo. That is, history in the form of the review of primary sources, the consideration of practices and motivations and choices. That is, given generality, the inquiry into the character and mores of people acting over time, with regard to the subject matter with which they work–their techne, their technology, their phronesis, their purposeful ability to translate knowledge into useful tools and activity.
Yes, when telling a narrative about how things get to be, things need to end up in the present. But no, they do not need to end up also confirming how we think about the present, perpetuating how we are to think about the present. Innovation in essence is about the ability to think differently about the present without merely committing to improve the condition of the status quo
I construct this sequence:
Things happen, and we break them later for retelling into matter, efforts, and events. Matter is places, things, subjects, artifacts. Events may be choices, epiphanies, accidents, and the like. Efforts are the links of doing or not doing between events. From this, narratives are built that establish context and setting, and show the conflicts and affinities across different individuals and groups pursuing matter across events.
An inventor gains commercial success. Or,
A chemist discovers warfarin, which becomes a commercial success in two different markets. Or,
A university-based agricultural chemist discovers warfarin, which becomes both a rat poison and a beneficial anticoagulant in humans. Or,
It was his students who discovered and synthesized and developed a variety of compounds, and after an effort to introduce one has limited success, they go back and develop another to much better effect, all led by a chemist with great connections in academics and industry, who was one of the best classroom teachers in chemistry in the state and was able to recruit talented students and motivate them to do tremendous work.
As we build up the detail, not only does the narrative gain substance, it also shifts: it becomes a different narrative. The abstract primitive narrative falls away, not as false, but as irrelevant as a summary. It is a summary supported by the facts that carries no insight into innovation. It is the narrative with details that brings us close to being “in the flow” and recognizing new narratives of innovation that might inform policy.
The work of reporting science and technology extracts innovation from its historical narrative. This is done in the name of being authoritative. It meets the claim that science produces public knowledge, natural facts existing apart from the claims and control of the first observer, or any observer. The next step, then, that reports need not include the observers or their choices, justifies shearing the observations of their wool to get at the very sheep itself.
This may happen quickly–not how the inventor came to invent, but how to generalize the technology from history to application, and qualify that use as necessary for safety, standards, training, design, and the like. It is by formalizing the innovation that it may circulate without reference to its discoverer or the particular pathway taken to reach a point of utility. One may take shortcuts, and reduce the narrative to its technological essentials.
Here is how a diesel engine operates, and it is no matter that Diesel may have been motivated in creating such an engine to provide craft workers with advantages relative to the power of factories in the marketplace. Scientific–abstracting–treatment of narrative shears off such social details as irrelevant, for a kind of fluffy entertainment ahead of the real work, the practical work, of learning the state of a current, mature expression of diesel technology. Some time in the future, having mastered such technology, one may be provided with the opportunity to suggest improvements. Otherwise, there is no point but to learn and exploit.
From such abstracting, we get a clear, useful, rational narrative of how a technology is used, what it is good for, how it works, how it might be improved, what we can expect in the future, and what sorts of problems are in need of mitigation. History in this work offers nothing practical. It is just a kind of idle enrichment, good for kids and people who don’t get it. Not needed by those with practical work to do, in a factory, under direction, for efficiency, to contribute to the common good, not to question the decisions that have gone before. Accept and improve the status quo.
People of action stick to the principles of operation and the characteristics of use. Those are the skills that matter. “Facts, facts, facts,” said Thomas Gradgrind. At best, in advanced discussions of technology, there is room for discussion of strengths and weaknesses, qualifications and limitations. This is technology competition–not just products, but standards, platforms, patterns of approach. But for the coarse public presentation, such material complicates and confuses. Keep it simple for the stupid. But what do policy makers then read to frame their thoughts?
As we move to training the public–and for study in preparation for policy formation–technology qualifications are stripped off and we get abstractions of technology, a decomposition of it into principles and system relationships and underlying skill requirements, such as mathematics and physics. The assumption is that there are universals of technology, and stripped of local accidents and condition, of history and social context, technology in its universal properties may be considered as a class, providing policy with a clear set of principles, and enabling a public to act on these to their advantage. It’s all very pragmatic, don’t you think?
Consider then what happens as such cleaned up narratives are considered for use in training curriculum in areas such as math and physics. How are these choices to be made? What math is needed to understand the technology as presented by science is potentially very different from what math did the inventor know by which he or she was able to come to the invention and characterize its design and methods of operation?
A curriculum might incorporate some aspect of an abstracted technology as a story problem or instance of application, brought forward, an perhaps put into a specially printed box on the page to illustrate the *subject* under training. This, rather than expect anyone to actually practice based on the illustration. Pure heuristic… or rather, as it may be, impure.
This line of technology narrative construction leads to a rationalizing of technology complexity and practicing into categories based, largely it would appear, what amounts to heuristics. Things said for the sake of simplifying training. It doesn’t really matter how things actually work, or are used, or whether that use is thought of as adequate within practice. Feynman in his talk in New York to high school teachers, hammers on this point. At least get it right conceptually. But how could anyone, working this way? For “training,” what matters is that the use suggests that the math or physics or whatever will be useful later, in other contexts. Anyone learning the math, then, is screened from that practice. There is no way to see limitations, uncertainties, variations, competing aspects, fallacies, nada. The training narrative cuts off the learner from the prospects of innovation. The technology itself does not even present as innovative. It presents as the way the world is. It presents unimaginatively. It presents shorn of its social being. It is an arch disorienting fiction. It may be abstract, but it does not change and it does not give pleasure.
We might say, history reopens a curriculum’s simplified, rationalized, heuristic narratives of technology.
By moving “back” in the development of any given element within a technology, we find branch points. A choice was made, or ignored, or missed altogether. Think of it in the nature of etymology, except here it is not the history of a word but of an artifact in use, of a phronesis. Etymophronetics. The true sense of practical insight drawn from its origins and history. One might find Tesla rather than Edison, working in a direction that fails for economic reasons, or lack of time, or distraction, or politics.
Doing such history undoes the narrative pattern that presents the simplifying claim that things were unknown and then were discovered (the event) necessarily resulting (effort) in the mature technology (artifact) we have today, but for improvements for which new trainees may be recruited, and problems which require mitigation. It is a narrative of recruitment into the status quo, and the way things “are”. It is entirely rational, organized, simplified, planned, and pragmatic.
But how is someone supposed to innovate within such ubiquitous narrative frames? How is such training not merely induction into the status quo, shorn of options, a shivering sheep not valued for the wool? Make mutton not sweaters.
The history I am considering reopens established innovation practice by revealing choices, alternatives, and exposing the line of development with motivations that create present practice, but now with variations for further work, or work that would branch from earlier alternatives not taken, or observations not considered, or extensions of systems now abandoned. Imaginatively, it places talented individuals “in the flow” of innovation, to see it as a sequence of choices rather than as inevitable events. It is these choices that innovation policy must consider, not the properties of successful outcomes.
For instance, in our 3d printing project to explore new materials, we are looking at magnesium oxide cements, which were displaced by Portland cements last century in the economics of commerce. But MgO cements are hardy, water-resistant, and and much better suited to 3d printing because they set quickly. As we look for simple materials outside manufacturer’s specs, we end up also looking, economically, back in time, revisiting decisions (or accidents, and other events) that may have been successful in shaping the course of technology change at the time but in present circumstances no longer may have the same standing, but for the inertia presented by the build out based on them.
What such a history may reveal is the prevalence of zombie technology decisions, whole streams of commerce and innovation policies that do not know they are dead…. But this is what the innovator knows and dreams about.