7. The Future of Innovation – Inventing the Future?
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
– H.G. Wells
David Bodanis landed at the airport in the US in the early 21st century, survived the formalities and caught a cab. The radio was on and he heard first news and then some music. At that point something peculiar struck him.
His plane, a jumbo, had been designed in the 1960s; the taxi was really not much more than a car from way back plus gloss and widgets. The radio station hadn’t changed in style from the mid-1970s: raucous announcing, news and discs. The news itself covered the tribulations of the space shuttle, again decades old. Even the music following was good ol’ country and western, with mournful slide guitar and lyrics about dying dogs and fickle wives.
Everything that he’d just done could have taken place nearly 40 years before.
David is a friend of mine. He writes prize-winning books about the history of science-his latest, Electric Universe, picked up the Aventis Prize for best science book of the year in Britain. He, like me, is puzzled why we are not living in the space age (which began 50 years ago with Sputnik!,) but in Blade Runners, LA, a mixture of flash gear and squalid dysfunction. Trains crawl, planes are delayed, paper persists, machines break, drains block up, water leaks, tunnels fail and prime ministers hail from the 1950s. On the President of the United States I must remain silent.
With so much smart theory on innovation, why are our lives not transformed rather than tricked up? I spend my life broadcasting news about the latest brilliant technological ideas and David writing books about their impact and the people who make them happen. Are we wrong? Is everyone else living in a Shining New Age? I think not.
When I looked at the figures, it turned out that the heyday of innovation (in terms of patents per head of population) was in 1873 according to Jonathan Huebner of the Pentagon. The twentieth century slowed a bit and now, in the 21st century, innovation has dipped significantly. There are two reasons for this. First, the process of getting your idea or system up is tortuous: local rights, international rights, lawyers, manufacturing feasibilities… on and on. Second, there is a better payoff if you add a tiny twist to a proven product instead of going flat out to try to pull off a mega-innovation like an Internet or an iPod. I call this the Branson Effect.
Richard Branson has accumulated several fortunes by adding a gloss to standard products: phones, plane travel, pop music, finance-standard fare to which he gives a Branson Tweak together with lots of grinning girls in semi-undress. Now he’s intending to borrow someone else’s spacecraft to launch cosmic tourism. Branson’s boast is that he has done all this unencumbered by tertiary education. We’ll come to that. (I do, however, applaud Sir Richard’s moves to support environmental innovation).
A couple of years ago The Economist carried an editorial and devoted a section of the magazine to this effect. It demonstrated that the American food company Frito-Lay had made serious money by relaunching its corn chip with a curl in the corner instead of… well, flat. This meant consumers could now more easily scoop up a dollop of guacamole. Sales soared. The Economist asked whether making this simple, quick-return innovation was better than going to the expense of having scientists on staff doing in-house R &D. The magazine’s conclusion was that you could keep a bit of science-but outsource it.
The point about innovation, as CSIRO chair Catherine Livingston makes clear, is that a transformative idea takes a lot of investment and time to realise. And, as soon as you’ve launched it-the Viagra, the CD, the laptop-everyone knows it’s a winner and jumps on the bandwagon. Your market kill does not last that long. Better twist a crisp-an incremental innovation.
We live in an Incremental Society. Things creep, they don’t transform. Having avoided, just now, the mention of George W Bush, I must just mention the difference between the pin-point accuracy of the electronic wars our movies made much of in the 1980s and ‘90s and the utter shambles of warfare perpetrated by the world’s superpower in the new century. The Somme with lasers.
What about the innovators? Richard Branson, as I have noted, left school at sixteen. He was unbesmirched by a university degree and boasts that it is one of the secrets of his success-no second thoughts about subtleties. It just so happens that half of the UK ’s billionaires are also, notably, not university products. In Australia the ratio is similar. The last time I looked, seven of our billionaires (Richard Pratt, Kerry Stokes, Gerry Harvey, Harry Triguboff et al.) had been to some kind of college while eight (Frank Lowy, James Packer, Stan Perron et al.) had not.
Most of the mega innovations have, not surprisingly, come from men who went to university, even if some of them dropped out. So they gave us Windows, Google, the Internet and email. But mega is not predictable or quick enough to excite investors, and so the Branson Effect rules. The government tries to fill the gap. But another paradox is that rich countries manage to seem poor (the headline on the front page of my paper today proclaims ‘Our Maths Teaching Below India’s’). Thus I was leaked some preliminary figures by one of our state’s chief scientists. It showed Victoria and Queensland state governments investing ‘heavily’ in innovation ($620 million and $306 million respectively over nine or ten years) while the figure for New South Wales-the biggest, richest, flashiest state-was $10 million. Third World?
I am not suggesting old-fashioned socialism with top-down funding using your taxes for governments to pick winners but, frankly, if innovation is not receiving sufficient private funding where is the money going to come from? Ali Baba? This question applies to most of the activities partially vacated by government since the 1970s: science, education, museums, public broadcasting, infrastructure. This is what John Kenneth Galbraith used to describe as private wealth and public squalor.
What of the future? This is a tricky one because the historical perspective looks forbidding. There are two great instigators of innovation: disaster and war. I have mentioned in the Introduction how plague in the fourteenth century and thereafter preceded the Renaissance, Gutenberg (printing) and other revolutions in living. Innovation during war is obvious. The Second World War practically invented they way we live now, from space exploration to nuclear technology and materials. It is stunning to realise how quickly both nuclear weapons and penicillin were realised as products: barely four years from go to whoa! Compare the embarrassments of the International Space Station (decades), Wembley Stadium (years) and a cure for malaria (we keep waiting).
War and disaster focus the effort. In times of greater calm, or when leaders insist on short-term achievement (early China and present-day Australia, for example), bright ideas are not fostered. Australia has seen a doubling of students in business courses since 2000, while we rank 29th in the world in maths and science studies according to the World Economic Forum. This places us very well to sell things in the future, but with nothing much of our own, apart from rocks and crops, to offer. As the WEF observes: ‘Today’s globalising economy requires countries to nurture pools of well-educated workers able to adapt to their changing environment.’ Our performance looks better among fifteen-year-olds, mainly in problem solving, but academically we remain on the B list. Think we’ll make it?