Linking the words ‘‘science,’’ ‘‘technology,’’ and ‘‘innovation,’’ may suggest that we know more about how these activities are related than we really do. This very common linkage implicitly conveys a linear progression from scientific research to technology creation to innovative products. More nuanced pictures of these complex activities break them down into components that interact with each other in a multi-dimensional socio-technological economic network.
Science has always functioned on two levels that we may describe as curiosity-driven and need-driven, and they interact in sometimes surprising ways. Necessity is said to be the mother of invention, but in all human societies, ‘‘necessity’’ is a mix of culturally conditioned perceptions and the actual physical necessities of life. The concept of need, of what is wanted, is the ultimate driver of markets and an essential dimension of innovation. And as the example of the World Wide Web shows, need is very difficult to identify before it reveals itself in a mass movement. Why did I not know I needed a cell phone before nearly everyone else had one? Because until many others had one I did not, in fact, need one. Innovation has this chicken-and-egg quality that makes it extremely hard to analyze. We all know of visionaries who conceive of a society totally transformed by their invention and who are bitter that the world has not embraced their idea. Sometimes we think of them as crackpots, or simply unrealistic about what it takes to change the world. We practical people necessarily view the world through the filter of what exists and fail to anticipate disruptive change. Nearly always we are surprised by the rapid acceptance of a transformative idea. If we truly want to encourage innovation through government policies, we are going to have to come to grips with this deep unpredictability of the mass acceptance of a new concept. Works analyzing this phenomenon are widely popular under titles like ‘‘The Tipping Point’’ by Gladwell (2000) or more recently the book by Taleb (2007) called The Black Swan, among others.
Technologies are part of the environment for innovation, or in a popular and very appropriate metaphor—part of the innovation ecology.
The first point is that the structural aspects of ‘‘science, technology, and innovation’’ are imperfectly defined, complex, and poorly understood. There is still much work to do to identify measures, develop models, and test them against actual experience before we can say we really know what it takes to foster innovation. The second point I want to make is about the temporal aspects: all three of these complex activities are changing with time. Science, of course, always changes through the accumulation of knowledge, but it also changes through revolutions in its theoretical structure, through its ever-improving technology, and through its evolving sociology. The technology and sociology of science are currently impacted by a rapidly changing information technology. Technology today flows increasingly from research laboratories but the influence of technology on both science and innovation depends strongly on its commercial adoption, that is, on market forces. Commercial-scale manufacturing drives down the costs of technology so it can be exploited in an ever-broadening range of applications. The mass market for precision electro-mechanical devices like cameras, printers, and disk drives is the basis for new scientific instrumentation and also for further generations of products that integrate hundreds of existing components in new devices and business models like the Apple iPod and video games, not to mention improvements in old products like cars and telephones. Innovation is changing too as it expands its scope beyond individual products to include all or parts of systems such as supply chains and inventory control, as in the Wal-Mart phenomenon. Apple’s iPod does not stand alone; it is integrated with iTunes software and novel arrangements with media providers. With one exception, however, technology changes more slowly than it appears because we encounter basic technology platforms in a wide variety of relatively short-lived products. Technology is like a language that innovators use to express concepts in the form of products, and business models that serve (and sometimes create) a variety of needs, some of which fluctuate with fashion. The exception to the illusion of rapid technology change is the pace of information technology, which is no illusion.
Many science commentators have described the twentieth century as the century of physics and the twenty-first as the century of biology. We now know that is misleading. It is true that our struggle to understand the ultimate constituents of matter has now encompassed (apparently) everything of human scale and relevance, and that the universe of biological phenomena now lies open for systematic investigation and dramatic applications in health, agriculture, and energy production. But there are two additional frontiers of physical science, one already highly productive, the other very intriguing. The first is the frontier of complexity, where physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, and mathematics all come together. This is where nanotechnology and biotechnology reside. These are huge fields that form the core of basic science policy in most developed nations. The basic science of the twenty-first century is neither biology nor physics, but an interdisciplinary mix of these and other traditional fields. Continued development of this domain contributes to information technology and much else.
I worry about the psychological impact of the rapid advance of information technology. I believe it has created unrealistic expectations about all technologies and has encouraged a casual attitude among policy makers toward the capability of science and technology to deliver solutions to difficult social problems. This is certainly true of what may be the greatest technical challenge of all time—the delivery of energy to large developed and developing populations without adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere. The challenge of sustainable energy technology is much more difficult than many people currently seem to appreciate. I am afraid that time will make this clear.
Structural complexities and the intrinsic dynamism of science and technology pose challenges to policymakers, but they seem almost manageable compared with the challenges posed by extrinsic forces. Among these are globalization and the impact of global economic development on the environment. The latter expressed quite generally through the concept of ‘‘sustainability’’ is likely to be a component of much twenty-first-century innovation policy. Measures of development, competitiveness, and innovation need to include sustainability dimensions to be realistic over the long run. Development policies that destroy economically important environmental systems, contribute to harmful global change and undermine the natural resource basis of the economy are bad policies. Sustainability is now an international issue because the scale of development and the globalization of economies have environmental and natural resource implications that transcend national borders. From the policy point of view, globalization is a not a new phenomenon. Science has been globalized for centuries, and we ought to be studying it more closely as a model for effective responses to the globalization of our economies. What is striking about science is the strong imperative to share ideas through every conceivable channel to the widest possible audience. If you had to name one chief characteristic of science, it would be empiricism. If you had to name two, the other would be open communication of data and ideas. The power of open communication in science cannot be overestimated. It has established, uniquely among human endeavors, an absolute global standard. And it effectively recruits talent from every part of the globe to labor at the science frontiers. The result has been an extraordinary legacy of understanding of the phenomena that shape our existence. Science is the ultimate example of an open innovation system.
Keeping in mind that the innovation ecology includes far more than science and technology, it should be obvious that within a small national economy innovation can thrive on a very small indigenous science and technology base. But innovators, like scientists, do require access to technical information and ideas. Consequently, policies favorable to innovation will create access to education and encourage free communication with the world technical community. Anything that encourages awareness of the marketplace and all its actors on every scale will encourage innovation.
