[THIS IS SOMETHING THAT I WROTE IN MY 750WORDS.ORG ACCOUNT. AS SUCH, IT'S MORE NOTES THAT A FORMAL ARTICLE. I APOLOGIZE FOR THAT.]
This is the idea that there is a surface of "innovation" that is continually expanding. Each point on the surface represents some specific area of innovation. This surface is like a balloon in that is constantly growing. Innovations that were once small specs on the surface become large areas as people understand the innovation, dig deeper into it, and create new micro-innovations based on it. The "pressure" inside comes from the increase in innovation. As new things are conceived of/discovered, that adds pressure to other points on the surface (a rising tide raising all boats). Not all innovations increase every other innovation, but, on average, the increase in innovation generally adds pressure to other innovations. This pressure is a positive influence, and represents the ability to move innovations forward. There are two broad areas of interest on an innovation surface.
The first are areas where extra effort has been put into a "technology" (using this word as generically as possible) to move it forward ahead of the rate of expansion of the balloon. A prime example of this is the US space program starting from around the time that Sputnik was launched. At the natural rate of expansion of technology, the US would not have been able to go to the moon by 1970, but the US poured huge amounts of financial and personnel resources into the project, moving technology in the "space" area of the balloon (and related technologies) forward. These areas are "pushed out" from the surface as they have expanded faster than the general rate of innovation.
The second area of interest are surface areas where innovation has not moved along as expected. An example of this might be in foosball tables. There are many ways that the classic game of foosball could be advanced (e.g. score detectors), but it hasn't moved ahead as that area has not been deemed worthy of exploration (there are many MUCH better examples, I'm sure, but this is all that comes to me at the moment). These areas appear as depressions on the surface of the balloon as they have not kept pace with the general rate of innovation. These areas of depression are of interested because they represent places that could leap forward rapidly from their "current" state of innovation. Foosball, for example, could benefit from detectors in the rods, interactive screens as the playing field, and the like (again, a horrible example). (Worth nothing that the reason that Foosball is a horrible example is that increasing innovation does NOT need to imply added complexity. In fact, it may typically mean reduced complexity. The examples of improving foosball generally add more points of failure and expense than they may add fun to the game. Therefore these aren't necessarily radical leaps forward for the game, but could actually hinder interest, but hopefully you get the point of where I'm trying to go here.)
So why are these areas depressed to begin with? There could be any number of reason. Innovation of any sort requires the confluence of many factors, and the lack of any one of them can retard progress. Generally it probably comes down to things like: people actually paying attention to a space (many things get under-attended because they are out of fashion, or just not in the public consciousness much), people thinking that there is no room for innovation in that field or that innovations would be too hard to apply (this might be the case with foosball, for example), or that there are countervailing forces attempting to maintain the status quo. The latter case is illuminating to why a lot of areas of innovation move forward rapidly, and then stop moving at all (to the point of falling behind the innovation rate).
Take again the US space program. Moving it forward was a herculean effort. And it worked! But to keep the program going, we had to solidify ways of thinking about going to space because the innovation surface hadn't caught up to the point that other options were viable. If, for example, we would not have gotten into space for 20 more years had no "race" been in effect, then you could say that effort had to go in to maintaining this advance for 20 years. Again, this solidified thinking around going to space, and, importantly, resulted in huge bureaucracies being put into place to help maintain both the effort of making the parts to go into space, and the effort to keep up our ability to go into space. Once the innovation surface caught up, there was already a vested interest in a particular way of thinking about the problem, and a lot of "we have to get our money's worth" kinds of thinking that went along with the huge budgets that the space program had been given.
Now we see the emergence of commercial space travel, and non-governmental entities gearing up to go into space. But this commercialization may have happened many years earlier if we hadn't pushed very hard to move the technology ahead of the surface.
In a way, you can think of the surface as an indicator of when it is efficient to push a technology ahead. Of course, there is no actual visible surface, and its interactions are extremely more complex than I've outlined here, but hopefully this provides a useful framework for how to think about innovation when considering problems like why it still costs $10,000 to put 1kg into space.
2 comments:
Your point about the space program is interesting. I wonder what you feel about the interplay between private and governmental interests in a field. The bubble of space program was accelerated by government intervention, so does that mean whenever government intervenes that we will have this lag after government gets out of the business in question? For myself, I think all the ancillary benefits of this government funded accelerated push far outweigh any lag time later. If it weren't for the push in the space program, it also probably would have been and additional 20 years til we had groundbreaking developments in microcomputing, polymer technology, and other areas.
No, I don't think that you necessarily get the lag just because of governmental intervention. It really has to do with the scale of the intervention, and how far ahead of an "innovation surface" that you push. And even this is mostly due to the calcification of infrastructure that I'm guessing typically would accompany such a push.
To be clear, I'm not suggesting that this push into space was BAD necessarily. Certainly pushing a technology (or broad set of technologies) out above their surface can bring great gains in the short term, and, potentially, have negligible effects in the long term. What it DOES seem to do, however is create a misalignment in people's expectations of the pace of technology, leading them to ask why we don't have a colony on the moon yet. Moon colonies are Herculean efforts, which require sustained pressure. If the political will disappears, then we have all of this catching up that non-governmental institutions need to do.
And, of course, once you put it into the hands of business, they start looking at cost/benefit relationships, and may decide that the innovation surface hasn't caught up enough yet to make it worth the effort.
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