On big, shiny ideas..............

 If you find yourself wondering how no one has thought of this before, that’s a warning sign. Chances are, there’s a quiet graveyard of leaders who learned something expensive that you haven’t yet uncovered. Go talk to them.

I’m pro-innovation. I believe in big ideas. But I’m skeptical of shiny ones—too clean, too theoretical, too detached from human realities. The best strategies are forged in constraint, humility, and patience. They’re honest about how many variables they’re trying to solve at once.

-Mike Sharrow, from here

via

interesting theory....................

 

"the decline of the heavy manufacturing industry in the American “Rust Belt” is often thought to have begun in the late 1970s, when the United States suffered a significant recession. But theory suggests, and data support, that the Rust Belt’s decline started in the 1950s when the region’s dominant industries faced virtually no product or labor competition and therefore had little incentive to innovate or become more productive."

The rust-belt’s problems were caused not by its industries' and workers' confrontation with economic competition but, instead, from their insulation from competition— . . .

-Don Boudreaux, from this post

Intangibles.....................

 

Economists in the 19th century described production as using tangible resources, notably land, unskilled labor, factories, and business equipment. But by the 21st century, it was evident that intangibles increasingly matter. Human skill level, business strategy, innovation, and the institutional environment determine how wealth gets created.

-Arnold Kling, from this episode

possible..........................

 

     Sony had the benefit of cheaper wages in Japan, but its business model was ultimately about innovation, product design, and marketing.  Morita's "license it" strategy couldn't have been more different form the "copy it" tactics of Soviet Minister Shokin.  Many Japanese companies had reputations for ruthless manufacturing efficiency.  Sony excelled by identifying new markets and targeting them with impressive products using Silicon Valley's newest circuitry technology.  "Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want," Morita declared.  "The public does not know what is possible, but we do."

-Chris Miller, Chip War

A different perspective...............................

 ..........................................................In praise of "bubbles."

One role for the government.....................

      These massive and predictable sources of demand from the government caused the price of each microchip to fall rapidly.  The first prototype chip for the Apollo Guidance Computer cost $1,000.  By the time they were being put into regular production, each cost $20.  The average price for each microchip in the Minuteman missile was $50 in 1962; by 1968 it was $2.  Thus was launched the market for putting microchips in devices for ordinary consumers.

-Walter Isaacson, The Innovators:  How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created The Digital Revolution

Recommended............................

 

existential challenge....................

 ". . . the existential challenge of today's capitalism is to break the habit of both companies' and governments' reluctance to encourage innovation, despite their words.

      Schumpeter's 'perennial gale of creative destruction' has been replaced by the gentle breezes of rent-seeking.  Corporate managerialism is gradually squeezing the life out of enterprise as big companies in cosy cahoots with big government increasingly dominate the scene." . . .

". . . The economist Luigi Zingales argues that most of the time 'the best way to make lots of money is not to come up with brilliant ideas and work hard at implementing them but, instead, to cultivate a government ally."

-Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works:  And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

a burgeoning trend......................

 Those who say that indefinite growth is impossible, or at least unsustainable, in a world of finite resources are therefore wrong, for a simple reason:  growth can take place through doing more with less.

      Much 'growth' is actually shrinkage.  Largely unnoticed, there is a burgeoning trend today that the main engine of economic growth is not from using more resources, but from using innovation to do more with less:  more food from less land and less water; more miles for less fuel; more communication for less electricity; more buildings for less steel; more transistors for less silicon; more correspondence for less paper; more socks for less money; more parties for less time worked.

-Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works:  And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

Contrasting outlooks...........................

      The difference between Hopper's version of history and IBM's ran deeper than a dispute over who should get the most credit.  It showed fundamentally contrasting outlooks on the history of innovation.  Some studies of technology and science emphasize, as Hopper did, the role of creative inventors who make innovative leaps.  Other studies emphasize the role of teams and institutions, such as the collaborative work done at Bell Labs and IBM's Endicott facility.  This latter approach tries to show that what may seem like creative leaps—the Eureka moment— are actually the result of an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies, and engineering methods ripen together.  Neither was of looking at technological advancement is, on its own, completely satisfying.  Most of the great innovations of the digital age sprang from an interplay of creative individuals (Mauchly, Turing, von Neumann, Aiken) with teams that knew how to implement their ideas.

-Walter Isaacson, The Innovators:  How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Messy................................

 One of the flaws in the way we recount stories of innovation is that we unfairly single out individuals, ignoring contributions of lesser mortals. . . . Innovation is not an individual phenomenon, but a collective, incremental and messy network phenomenon.

-Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

Lest we forget...........................

 ". . . innovation is not usually a choreographed, planned, or managed thing.  It cannot be easily predicted, as may a red-faced forecaster has discovered.  It runs mostly on trial and error, the human version of natural selection.  And it usually stumbles on great breakthroughs when looking for something else; it is heavily serendipitous."

-Matt Ridley, How Innovation Works And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

Autonomy.........................

     Years after his initial work on the Dymaxion Vehicle, Fuller would theorize that the core of the problem obstructing progress on such a vehicle was a condition he had faced many times during his career and which he perceived as a continuing impediment to humanity's advancement.  That single issue is the bureaucratic drive for power and control that pervades any organization, especially governments.  Both the Dymaxion House and the Dymaxion Vehicle were conceived to function autonomously.  Once built and installed, they would require no roads, airports, electrical power lines, plumbing and sewage connections, or any of the other links through which corporations and governments control individual human beings' lives.
     Bucky eventually realized that if such autonomous innovations were publicly available, independent-thinking humans would quickly discover that the bureaucracies dominating their lives were no longer necessary or useful. . . .
     Because of the formidable opposition he received from power structures, Fuller also realized that the officials who dominate other individuals through bureaucracies and who prosper from their power would resort to extremes in blocking any innovation which would provide individuals with more autonomy and freedom.   Still, he envisioned a new era in which responsibility for maintaining basis human needs would shift from governments and other institutions to individuals themselves . . .

-Lloyd Steven Sieden,  Buckminster Fuller's Univers:  His Life and Work


photo (and more info) via

More freedom, more innovation...............

Necessity is not the mother of invention. Ambition is.

-Matt Ridely, from this blog post on the serendipity of innovation

Is "sensible regulation"................

............................really possible, or is it just an oxymoron?

It is not just vaccines. Throughout the economy, with the exception of the digital industry, the West is experiencing an innovation famine. The Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter’s “perennial gale of creative destruction” has been replaced by the gentle breezes of rent-seeking. . . .

Innovation relies upon freedom to experiment and try new things, which requires sensible regulation that is permissive, encouraging and quick to give decisions. By far the surest way to rediscover rapid economic growth when the pandemic is over will be to study the regulatory delays and hurdles that have now been hastily swept aside to help innovators in medical devices and therapies, and to see whether such reforms could be applied to other parts of the economy too.

-two excerpts from this Matt Ridley post

Rewards and risks...............

History shows that the way innovators make ideas into practical and affordable products or processes is trial and error. Edison understood that, as does Jeff Bezos, who made plenty of mistakes on his way to huge success. Says Bezos: ‘Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week.’ Among Silicon Valley’s best features is a forgiveness of going bust at least once. Capital there is patient and takes risks.

-Matt Ridley. as culled from this essay on unleashing trial and error, serendipity, speed, and innovation

On the importance of debate..............

     Hayek condemned those who wanted to suppress debate, what he called "the presumption of any group of people"—such as Myrdal's unanimous development experts—"to claim the right to determine what people ought to think or believe."  The absence of dissent would "produce a stagnation of thought and a decline of reason."  Hayek argued that it is not possible to know which innovation in thinking will succeed (otherwise it wouldn't be innovation!):  "results [of thinking] cannot be predicted . . . we cannot know which views will assist this growth [of reason] and which will not—in short . . . this growth cannot be governed by any views which we now possess without at the same time limiting it."  For development to occur it is thus necessary to have the debate among many "different views." . . .
     All that can be predicted is that inhibiting debate is bad for the progress of reason.  The absence of debate on the technocratic approach to development stifles progress in development, which in itself is immoral.

-William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts:  Economists, Dictators and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor

The radical shift............................

Our age is characterized by a radical shift along this spectrum:  from a public that was almost entirely reactive, to one that is hyper-active and ultra-intrusive.  This was made possible by a proliferation of choices.  The process resembled the radical strategic reversal described in my fable of Homo Informaticus.  As more structural options became available to ordinary people, the latter began a migration back to their original interests, and the institutions which had once hemmed their behavior lost the power to do so. 

. . . In business, design took priority over production, and personalization emerged as the grand ideal for design.  In information, technological innovation released an astronomical number of capabilities for use and abuse by ordinary persons, reconstituting the new public and enabling its assault on the temples of authority.

this last development can help explain why Lippmann and Dewey got the future wrong:  like every other person on the planet Earth, they failed to foresee the advent of personalized information technology.

-Martin Gurri,   The Revolt of the Public

When tithing is a bargain..............

     From as early as 1913, AT&T has been battling the U. S. government over its monopoly control of the nation's phone service.  That it was, in fact, a monopoly was undeniable.  If you were making a phone call in the United States at any point between 1930 and 1984, you were almost without exception using AT&T's network.  That monopoly power made the company immensely profitable, since it faced no significant competition.  But for seventy years, AT&T managed to keep the regulators at by by convincing them that the phone network was a "natural monopoly" and a necessary one.  Analog phone circuits were simply too complicated to be run by a hodgepodge of competing firms; if Americans wanted to have a reliable phone network, it needed to be run by a single company.  Eventually, the antitrust lawyers in the Justice Department worked out an intriguing compromise, settled officially in 1956.  AT&T would be allowed to maintain its monopoly over phone service, but any patented invention that had originated in Bell Labs would have to be freely licensed to any American company that found it useful, and all new patents would have to be licensed for a modest fee.  Effectively, the government said to AT&T that it could keep its profits, but it would have to give away its ideas in return.
     It was a unique arrangement, one we are not likely to see again.  The monopoly power gave the company a trust fund for research that was practically infinite, but every interesting idea that came out of that research could be immediately adopted by other firms.  So much of the American success in postwar electronics - from transistors to computers to cell phones - ultimately dates back to that 1956 agreement.  Thanks to the antitrust resolution, Bell Labs became one of the strangest hybrid in the history of capitalism:  a vast profit machine generating new ideas that were, for all practical purposes, socialized.  Americans had to pay a tithe to AT&T for their phone service, but the new innovations AT&T generated belonged to everyone.

-Steven Johnson,  How We Got to Now:  Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

Seeking common ground..............

.................................................................wherever you can find it:

In November, Amazon released a video ad portraying a pair of aging friends—a priest and an imam—laughing, hugging, and then ordering the same knee braces for each other. It is a sensitive and moving vignette, portraying Amazon as a connector of cultures, the kind of compassionate business it has not always been given credit for being. The ad arrived just two weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, so I ask Bezos what the company’s role might be in bridging the divides that exist in the U.S. After all, he bankrolls the Washington Post, which went after Trump aggressively during the presidential campaign (and was an early and influential opponent of Trump's immigration ban). His answer is almost laughably narrow. "Well, I’ll tell you one way that I don’t think anybody is divided," Bezos replies. "Everybody wants fast delivery. Low prices. I’m serious about this. Our job is to provide a great customer experience, and that is something that is universally desired all over the world."

-as culled from this Fast Company essay on Bezos and Amazon