Posted by
Pamela McCorduck on
Feb 13, 2010; 5:31pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Sources-of-Innovation-tp4566136p4567033.html
On Feb 13, 2010, at 12:12 PM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
> What an interesting question!
>
> Getting to an answer requires setting aside ALL ideology and doing a
> comparative study, across history and national boundaries, on the
> phenomenon of technological leadership.
>
> Who knows, for instance, how the internet was developed? By Al
> Gore over
> a latte, right! That's top down.
By a handful of visionary guys at ARPA in the 1960s who were left
alone to do it or fail. Failure was always a possibility.
> Do the following span some dimension of
> interest:
>
> Manhattan project
Very much top down as a project, though inspired by a small group of
scientists who worried what might be happening in Germany.
> Lanl's work on Energy
> NSF 's call for proposals on, say, Dynamical Systems.
A response to what was originally a very bottom up phenomenon (if you
consider scientists the bottom of anything).
> Ordinary NSF Research Grants
Widely thought to be status quo stuff. Peer review by people who've
already tried that and "know" it can't be done.
> The human genome project
A topdown event until Craig Venter said, I can do it faster, better,
cheaper. And did.
> Ordinary professors fooling around in their laboratories.
Those days are much attenuated, if they're not gone. The amount of
time it takes to raise research money is getting like raising money in
politics. Jobs are fewer, so there's enormous pressure to achieve
tenure.
In short, I don't think there's any one answer as to what encourages
innovation, but there are several, and some of them are pretty
obvious. A lot of work has been done on human networking--Silicon
Valley thrived on bright people rubbing up together in bars after
work, at PTA meetings, at whatever. Ditto Route 128. A culture that
doesn't frown on risk, which means you can fail, pick yourself up,
dust yourself off, and start all over again.
We certainly know what discourages innovation, and it's squatting on
our heads right now.
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