An article in a recent Economist reports that elite craft industries in Italy–fashion and leather goods–are unable to find new workers even though there are jobs available that pay well and youth unemployment is 35%. It seems that youth are being lured (or pressured) to take yucky college courses in the hope of obtaining jobs with apparent higher status than that of making textile things. One might think that the honor of craft work has diminished, not as a result of anything about the work itself, but for other reasons. It may be part of a larger ethos, that somehow making things is the domain of machines, even if they cannot do it so well, and repairing things is, well, why do that when things can be thrown away and new machine-made things purchased? “No customer serviceable parts inside–really, we mean it, we designed it that way, it is part of our business model!”
In economic development circles, a lot of the talk is about jobs, and a currently trendy way to talk about jobs is with the language of innovation and collaboration. In part, this appears to be a patch-thinking selection of wording from Porter’s work on industry clusters. There, a cluster forms as firms interact with each other, do business with one another, and share economies of scale and visibility by co-locating, and as a consequence recruiting new talent and suppliers to the area. But in economic development studies like the ones commissioned at the level of a city or county, industry cluster often means merely grouping a bunch of businesses under the same category, regardless of whether they do business with one another, or have sufficient critical mass to distinguish their products and services regionally let alone nationally or internationally, or enjoy any economies of scale or externalities as a result. For economic development studies, apparently, having a clump is as good as a cluster. Or perhaps it is the case that policymakers believe they can turn clumps into clusters by writing a report about it and hoping.
In one economic development plan pushed by the State of Washington, the idea was to identify clumps, and then get the clumps to collaborate (“in networks”), the premise being that if clumped companies collaborate, they will innovate and create jobs. This was billed as a “bottom-up”approach. It’s just that there is little to indicate that the kind of collaboration being proposed–begging together for state support, say, or making a show of meeting together–has anything at all to do with innovation or job creation (other than for state workers and consultants helping clumped companies understand what tricks they must do to get subsidies). One might think that the meaningful economic collaboration–and competition–comes about without regard to clumping, and perhaps even more so in the absence of clumping, and perhaps after there are jobs, and then innovation. One might think that the sequence is spark, jobs, then innovation, then cluster — rather than clump, cluster, then innovation, then jobs.
It’s this “spark” bit which can’t be planned. No economic development report I have read has it. One does not find: “What you folks need is someone or group with a really bright idea, who acts on it, and isn’t crushed by all of you “strong” leaders and organizations with your preconceived opinions and self-interest and indifference, so that something new and unanticipated happens, that catches people’s imaginations, and thus you begin to do something with new leadership, in new ways, that obsolesces much of what you are worried about now.” No one writes this way. First, because the range of what may be such a spark is simply *too great* to be able to pick out of the future what might work–and it might be that one has to have two or three sparks at the same time. (This is related to Popper’s observation on innovation–if you can define it in advance, it isn’t all that innovative, really, is it?) Second, because such a premise is generally offensive to those commissioning the report, appearing at once to be non-responsive to the problem as formulated, implying that the problem is with the formulators, and at the same time offering nothing in its place. Not even “plastics.”
I note that almost all economic development studies I’ve seen at the city or county level have as standard elements (1) a valorization of the “strengths” of the region; (2) a flattery of the region’s “leaders”; (3) a bit about how wonderful the region is; and (4) a set of problems to be addressed, already identified by the leaders. The call to action then includes (5) spend more on the problems identified; (6) do a better job of marketing the region; and (7) create infrastructure that produces high paying jobs through innovation and education. All this designed (8) to build on the “strengths” of the region–that is, to preserve the status of the “leaders”–the ones paying for the report. One can almost put an unopened report to one’s forehead and sense this standard narrative.
Benoît Godin points out that “innovation” has generally meant “introducing change to an established order,” and for most of its life, innovation as a concept has been used to point to a bad thing. One original meaning of a precursor word, kainotomia, as used by Xenophon, was to open up a new mine shaft, to dig where there was no assurance of profit (leading Xenophon to make a proposal regarding the use of public slaves in the service entrepreneurs that sounds remarkably like the modern status of graduate students at public universities). In conventional usage, innovators are threatening, foolish, criminal, heretical, traitorous folk. The appropriate response to “You are an innovator” traditionally was “No! *You* are the innovator!” Innovators generally created jobs for lawyers, prison guards, and undertakers. Only in the past 150 years has innovation come to have positive uses, led mostly by the rise of new methods in science, and hence a closer association with technology than, say, religion, politics, or social norms.
In Confucian usage, one finds the “mandate of heaven“–an even less rewarding concept of innovation. In mandate of heaven thinking, “the winner wins because he is virtuous, and the loser loses because he is immoral.” Or, another way of putting it, “the one that wins is the lord, and the one that loses is a criminal.” If you try to innovate and fail, well, there are more jobs for lawyers, prison guards, and undertakers. This is rather a variation of Thrasymachus’s argument in The Republic, that justice serves those in power–one might say, then, that those in power decide what innovation is good–it is the change in the established order that they allow, to their advantage. The undercurrent to all this is that innovator seeks a way to unseat the leaders, to take over what they have, to be the new emperor, to define what is right and just and true–and to throw the old leaders and their followers into jail, or chase them out of the country.
In their own way, a lot of economic development plans offered up by conslutants aim to serve the established order in its search for things that will maintain itself. For this, one identifies strengths, leaders, and their problems, and then proposes ways for the leaders to use their strengths to address these problems. One never finds a report in which the conslutants propose that the leadership is all wrong, the regions strengths are a liability, it’s a wonder anyone can stand the place in its present condition, and other folks–often the apparent causes of the problems–might do a better job. That is, the innovation that shows up in such reports and plans is of the sort that aims to further the advantages of the those that are already advantaged. It’s not an unhuman thing to aspire to, of course, but also, it’s not really all that innovative, in that it greatly restricts what changes to the established order might be productively introduced.
The challenge, then, with innovation is to imagine what might be proposed if someone is working at odds with the desires, roadmaps, investment strategies, and holdings of the leaders and their followers in the established order. Such work is rarely possible by assemblies representing an established order, whether of a region, a company, or an institution. It is simply too difficult to imagine a world better off because one is not so important in it after all. It’s even more difficult to hire someone to make you want to slink away with a report for everyone to read. So, generally, it’s just not done.
Perhaps this is another way of saying, Hayek had a point about government involvement in innovation. Government simply cannot pick the winners, or decide what professions must be subsidized, or who should be doing what. It is not that government could be improved so that it can do these things. It is not possible. A government cannot anticipate the needs and opportunities of any individual, cannot respond with the priority and intent of the individual, and must therefore necessarily constrain personal liberty and conscience to the service of making the government’s plan “succeed” (or appear to succeed). To do this well, and with efficiency, creates the totalitarian state, no matter whether it is spun as holistic, martial, or socially just. This kind of thing writ small, is what compulsory invention ownership plans at universities do–force individual choices to serve institutional plans and policies rather than engage the community in all its diversity, uncertainty, and disorder.
Vannevar Bush develops an idea of innovation based on his own experience in a little- known book published four years after Science the Endless Frontier titled Modern Arms and Free Men. In Modern Arms and Free Men, Bush describes the conditions that led to the US being able to develop new technology to support WW2 efforts. He starts with the idea that we had a lot of “gadgeteers”–essentially kids who had grown up working on their cars, building ham radios, and the like. They knew how things worked, how to figure out how things worked, and how to make things worked. Then there were the mathematicians and the physicists, who had insight into new ideas about how things that weren’t obvious might be developed–sonar, radar, modeling random motion, digital computers, atomic bombs.
Bush developed teams of theoreticians and engineers, and he put them up independent of the military establishment but engaged with it. He also put them up independent of universities and corporations, but connected with these organizations for support. He mediated these institutional relationships. If the military controlled such teams, then it would only ask for what it knew to ask for. If the universities and companies controlled them, then they could not do want they needed to do. And if the military didn’t have input, then the team would develop without any knowledge of the conditions under which the new technology might be used.
In Bush’s experience, it is the availability of gadgeteers combined with the fringe experts that creates a robust environment in which to pursue new things. George Dyson’s Turing’s Cathedral does a good job, without much mentioning Bush, of illustrating, chapter after chapter, this sort of interplay, including the distaste at Princeton for having engineers in the math department at all, despite being the center, for a time, of the development of digital computing. In another context, Andrew Nelson and Cyrus Mody trace this sort of interplay among engineers and musicians in Stanford’s computer music program.
When Bush gets to Science the Endless Frontier, he is already thinking about how to adapt this kind of teamwork to civilian uses. The approach goes something like this:
1) draw together gadgeteers, engineers, and capable people with vision
2) focus their work on developing what they can best conceive
3) draw on areas of unexpected practice at will
4) engage the team with an establishment, but keep them independent
5) finish the project, validate it, and hand off work of refinement to others
For health, the establishment was “medicine”–which took the place of “military”. The aim was to place medical school based teams in contrast to established medical practice, but engaged with it. This kind of thing is really very different from the development of the linear model that champions basic research first, leaving it as a problem for speculative monopolists to find a way to make product, and only then on the condition that they pay a share of their revenues to the university administration. In Bush’s development, the government intervention is to allow independent teams to build what they imagine, demonstrate it, and then pursue implementations as they will, with whom they will.
What Bush conceives is a very different kind of collaboration than the stuff of “industry clusters” which now doesn’t even mean what Porter described but rather a bunch of companies clumped together by a semi-arbitrary classification scheme. The stale economic development thought is that these companies, so clumped, should then somehow “collaborate”–which in stale thinking means, roughly, work together to beg for a state subsidy, and then make the state officials look good in spending it.
The government does a similar thing with its present emphasis on “multi-disciplinary teams” in grant programs that rely on peer review so that the well place recommend the well placed. That is, peer review reduces to the leaders choosing themselves, academic program by academic program. Gladwell points out that in many cases, “just good enough” does every bit as well as the most apparently qualified. One might wonder then, if the only review ought to be for whether someone is “just good enough” to submit a proposal for funding, and after that, the choices should be *random*. No reading of the proposals at all, no scoring and commenting. Folks that get funded are then evaluated for whether they should be allowed to submit further applications, based on the work they do as they proposed. Horrifying thought, perhaps, but it is just this sort of horror that typifies the presence of innovation contesting the interests of an established order.
Much of the present spate of technology innovation arises out of an ethos of creating labor- saving devices. While there may be jobs in manufacturing such devices, and jobs for the suppliers of the raw materials and the transport to distribute product, the economics works by removing from circulation the craft jobs that once produced similar goods and services.
The computer has done this to the file clerk, under the rubric of “re-engineering the corporation.” Now we have software and IT workers at twice the pay, but with fewer overall jobs, and still fewer that are entry level. It would appear that some innovation, at least, destroys jobs. Marx and Engels anticipated the point, arguing that innovation by the established order was designed, especially, to disenfranchise workers, put workers at a disadvantage with regard to control of work and the workplace, and force them to relearn their jobs, but with greater dependence on the employer. As such, innovation could become a tool of job-control, not job-creation. It’s not that all innovation is of this type, but I have not read an economic development plan yet that tries to distinguish one form of innovation from another. As far as policy-makers are concerned, all innovation is good, all innovation creates jobs, all innovation creates wealth. It’s foolish stuff, self-serving stuff. One might as well say, “all innovation is good that maintains the established order while making the workers that remain more dependent on it for their livelihoods.” For an established order, this is pretty good stuff.
But innovation as a talking point these days has luster. One likes to talk about working in an innovative area. It’s not trendy to talk about learning, say, to source leather for jackets in a traditional way, or to make accordions from scratch, or to throw a clay pot. Even where we use machined parts, the designs now are for disposable things, nothing repairable, reusable, repurposed. It’s all the opposite design ethos from what McDonough and Braungart argue for in Cradle to Cradle and Upcycle. Of course, they are outsiders, and would upset established orders. So, innovators.
It may also involve a return to traditional crafts, performance, art, and engineering. By working with what is known in an area of practice, and mastering it, one gains a sense of what is not done, as well as what could be done. One becomes a gadgeteer, adept at figuring out how things work, how they might work, how they have worked, and what might be better, or different. One connects with the material world, not just to a model of it. By doing so, one finds new places to dig, to open up new mines of opportunity. To innovate, in the classical sense, even if it runs against the prudence and self-interest of an established order.
The point, however, is not merely to attack an established order, but rather to engage it. It may be that in doing so, the change also alters who leads, but not in a way that renders the losers criminals. It is by having a society in which such change can come about, that there are cycles of opportunity, and that the new leaders engage the past leaders, and that there is room yet again for others, so that workers at times control and at other times, managers, and at others technologists, and poets (as is evident at, say, the social institution of the music concert).
There is an uneasy tension between an established order and those that would change it up. Too much change, and there’s anarchy, and we lose continuity, learning, craft, and grammar. Too little change, and there is stasis, fragility, complacency, and a loss of diversity. As Stuart Kauffman has it, life is in an ordered domain, on the edge of chaos. One might then ask, how do established institutions like universities get closer to the edge of chaos? Less process rather than more. Roll back regulation rather than add more, and more strident ones, involving creative work, resources, money, and opportunities. Become institutionally vulnerable. Allow broader exploration, collaborations, and engagement than is contemplated by sponsored research agreements cast as contracts with deliverables. Cultivate talent independent of the status quo but also free of institutional claims, led perhaps by outlier visionaries, staffed by gadgeteers, engaged with and supported by an established order to develop things the order could not imagine or set for itself.
It’s really not that difficult to get back to where we were with Vannevar Bush’s experience, policy-wise, since it means undoing things done by bureaucrats rather than asking bureaucrats to do new things. The challenge is to be willing to introduce change to the established order, even if that means unnerving a few of the most vocal supporters of institutionalized speculative monopoly of creative work.