Yes, more than a billion people live in poverty but, thanks to extraordinary economic growth in Asia, the poor are now a comparatively small minority of the global population – not long ago they were the vast majority. I’m also uneasy about the undertone of hostility to business and the fact that you say so little about economics and entrepreneurship. Agreed, business innovation isn’t everything but, from Henry Ford to Michael Dell, it has brought goods and services that were once fabulously expensive within the reach of hundreds of millions. That’s how great technological innovations – almost invariably after a lengthy time lag – are brought to mass markets. Schumpeter put it well in 1942: ‘The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens, but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort.’

You argue that our era doesn’t compare with the ‘sweeping grandeur’ of earlier revolutions, but we’re too close to events to make a considered judgment. The most exciting innovations are unlikely to be visible until they have been brought to market. How many people realised in the 1980s the significance of what Vint Cerf, Bill Metcalf and Tim Berners-Lee were doing in computer networking? How many even noticed that the Arpanet had morphed into the Internet, not to mention all the other giant digital strides that were taking place then? Indeed, how could anyone outside Stanford have known before 1998 the significance of the work Larry Page and Sergey Brin were doing on PageRank? Google is one of dozens of examples of entirely new markets and industries created by rank outsiders, some of whom, like Apple and Nokia, have been significant technological as well as business innovators.

The last thirty years have been an extraordinary era of technological and business innovation, which I describe in Winners and Losers, Creators and Casualties of the Age of the Internet. Creative destruction has operated on a scale and at a pace never seen before and the biggest winners have been consumers. By standing back from the past we can sometimes see important patterns.

Many economic historians would question your rather rosy account of the so-called Agricultural and Industrial revolutions, which were pretty horrible experiences for most of those affected. The cheap food only came later, with the repeal of the Corn Laws and the opening up of the American West. The term ‘industrial revolution’ was only coined decades later – and in France, rather than in Britain – nobody at the time thought they were living through a glorious revolution. The historical consensus now is that technological and economic change has mostly been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, though it is punctuated by shocks, many of them from the disruptive innovations of entrepreneurs.

I share your enthusiasm for innovation, and agree with much of what you have to say about the value of ‘useless research’, the need to take risks, to be prepared to fail, to experiment and explore. It is certainly the case that that the pressure on large companies to produce consistent financial results makes this immensely difficult. With a few notable exceptions, they are mostly optimised for efficiency and execution, not exploration and discovery. That is why the most exciting innovations often come from outsiders whom nobody notices until they rocket to enormous commercial success. Complacent incumbents then find the ground crumbling beneath their feet, to quote Schumpeter again.

There is no reason to believe that the process will dry up, or even slow down. Indeed some of the most interesting innovations in healthcare and manufacturing are now coming from countries like India and China, where there seems to be more entrepreneurial spirit and optimism than in the West. I see every reason to be optimistic about mankind’s ability to find ingenious solutions to pressing problems

http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConBlog.5

Comments gratefully received.

I’ve registered by email and will await the published document eagerly.

It’s not true at all that economic, fiscal or regulatory actions are zero-sum, and I hope that this does not mean that the manifesto excludes social or economic innovation as a source of human welfare and fulfilment.

My slightly different take on this (and do correct me if I have wrongly interpreted the excerpt you quote above):
http://www.knowingandmaking.com/2010/02/pareto-improvement-fail.html