Futures-Diagnosis

Diagnosing the future of the Internet and innovation and their social impact

October 6, 2011 • 9:27 pm 1

STEVE JOBS: DON’T MOURN, MOBILIZE!

The passing of Steve Jobs is indeed a sad day for those of us who remain passionate about technology, innovation and changing society. But the global mourn-fest that we have seen on the web so far, from President Obama downwards, diminishes rather than edifies the memory of Steve Jobs.

In an age where a culture of low-expectations, short-termism, risk aversion and the abrogation of responsibility is rife, the passing of Steve Jobs is certainly something to mark. Where others followed convention, bowing to known outcomes often driven by focus-groups, Jobs followed his instincts and self-belief and was willing to risk all to get where he believed he needed to go. In all of these respects, especially today, he was a man out of his times. Above all he was a leader in an age where leaderlessness is all too prevalent, from Obama to the EU and through almost every corporate boardroom in the Western hemisphere.

But to honour these qualities we should not elevate him onto a pedestal or create a cult around him, but rather redouble our efforts of emulating his enduring innovative spirit. And that means taking on the barriers to innovation that beset Western society today.

Don’t praise Ceaser, bury the myths

Of course people are shocked and sad by the news and the first reaction was to share their emotional responses on Facebook and twitter. But the tenor and content of many of the obituaries are problematic.

Steve Jobs did not cure cancer, nor did he cure the common cold which is not what you might expect to hear had you been reading many of the obituaries published today. Pure genius? In some respects perhaps, in many others, definitely not.

Let me be clear: I am a decades-old Mac evangelist. I certainly praise Apple for having made great strides in changing humanity’s conception of computing. But let’s not get carried away considering that Microsoft’s windows was the starting point from which we measure this. Apple certainly came a long way but to suggest that we’re at the end of the journey, or that because Steve Jobs is gone, we can go no further, is to trash the very spirit of Steve Jobs.

Again, I love my iPhone, my iPad and iPods.

There remain an enormous number of problems that need solving that will mean transcending existing Apple devices.

  • The iPhone, for example, remains tethered to yesterday’s voice paradigm which has not fundamentally changed in over 100 years;
  • All the devices suffer from poor battery performance, the iPhone in particular;
  • While user generated content has been made easier by Apple software, content remains tied to business models and IP structures that prefigure the digital age;
  • Touchscreen interfaces are certainly an advance, but serious usability issues remain tied as we are to yesterday’s data structures and models.

There are many more issues I can list. My purpose is to suggest that there remains a lot of work to be done.

Instead of burying ‘Ceaser’, we should be pledging and plotting how we can take up the mantle Jobs has left us.

What will you do if today was your last day?

The salience of Job’s pledge to himself, to maximise his time, should be our starting point:

  • What are you going to do to challenge today’s culture of low expectations?
  • How are you going to win the argument for technological advancement in an age of environment-correctness that is increasingly hostile to technological progress?
  • What are you going to do to challenge corporate short-termism and risk-aversion in your quest for innovation?
If anything, the death of Steve Jobs should be a rallying cry, not for looking backwards and revering the past, but for confronting the contemporary barriers to innovation in order to create Steve Jobs2.0, Steve Jobs3.0 and so on.
As Jobs himself remarked, ‘you can only join up the dots by looking back’. The point, however, is to create new opportunities for tomorrow’s dots. That’s the legacy we need to uphold and affirm in the light of Steve Job’s passing.

Filed under: Innovation, Risk and Innovation, ,

August 1, 2010 • 12:51 pm 1

WHEN RESEARCH MAKES QUANTUM DEVELOPMENT SENSE

The call this week by Lord Browne, the former BP chief executive, for a sweeping review of the UK’s £4bn-a-year science budget to emphasise projects with the potential to bring short-term industrial benefits, has sparked a fury amongst scientists. (See ‘Common room clashes with boardroom on science budget’, Financial Times. This is precisely what we warned against in the Big Potatoes Manifesto where we argue in principle 4 ‘For Useless Research’ that research remains the bedrock upon which the flow of innovation ultimately depends – a bedrock that is increasingly being questioned and undermined in our short-termist recessionary times.

Lord Browne’s instrumentalism certainly makes re-stressing this point timely and urgent. But the correctness of this fundamental research proposition was forcibly driven home to me during my recent holiday when I had the luxury and sheer delight of reading Manjit Kumar’s tour de force Quantum: Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality .

This is an absolute must for all those supporters of Big Potatoes. It describes in a remarkably entertaining and accessible fashion, the history of science’s fundamental revolution – quantum physics and mechanics – and the remarkable intellectual battle between Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr and other brilliant young scientists who were at the heart of this inspiring story.

More importantly, it reveals some critical insights into the processes and interactions that led to a scientific revolution which gave rise to the innovations we now take for granted: the transistor, the computer, the World Wide Web, the communications revolution.

UNEXPECTED OUTCOMES

Kumar shows that when these great physicists formulated quantum mechanics from 1900 to 1930, they were trying to understand the fundamental laws of the universe, not invent something of great economic importance. Their quest was the sheer beauty of solving some of the most baffling and abstract theoretical questions. The implications of their quest were so far-reaching it impacted almost everything, transforming sister disciplines like chemistry, for example. Today, all chemists and material scientists are trained extensively in quantum mechanics. Biologists like Francis Crick, who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of DNA, realized many years ago that the laws of physics and quantum mechanics ultimately govern even biology.

Quantum mechanics is necessary to engineer solid-state devices such as transistors, which are the building blocks of electronics and computers. Understanding semiconductors (the building blocks of transistors), or any material cannot be fully grasped with classical physics alone (i.e. physics known before the discoveries of quantum mechanics and relativity). Without quantum mechanics, the “information age” (and much of modern science) would not exist today. The inventions of the computer, the transistor, the World Wide Web and the laser used in fibre optics, (the basis for a global telecommunications industry) owe their existence to quantum mechanics and are worth trillions of dollars.

But to stress this point again, these were unexpected outcomes. The pursuit was science, the quest for purity and the beauty of an unassailable proof – and a closer approximation of reality.

There were three things about the book that really caught my attention, which are so germane to the debate we have started with the Big Potatoes Manifesto:

THE ‘LIMITS’ OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE

Kumar relates the story about Max Planck, the father of Quantum who at the age of sixteen enrolled at Munich University to study physics because of his burgeoning desire to understand the working of nature. Planck spent three years at Munich which were to have a big impact on him, mainly because he was advised to give up physics as ‘it is hardly worth studying physics anymore’ because there was nothing important left to discover. Planck went on to become the father of quantum mechanics because, as he discovered, there was certainly a lot more to discover about how the world works. Planck reacted against the narrowness and conservatism of his peers. He defied the attitude, which we seem to accept today, that mankind had somehow reached the limits to knowledge. Instead his openness and willingness to question existing orthodoxy unleashed a scientific revolution, the creation of new knowledge and ultimately, the development of remarkable innovations that changed life in the 20th century.

PEERS COMMITTED TO THE GREATER GOOD

The second striking point Kumar brings out in his examination of the interaction of this extraordinary group of scientists was their willingness to engage each other as professionals in a common quest for truth. First, what united them was a belief in objective truth. Second, that despite different opinions (and often bitterly at odds) they were nevertheless united as pioneers committed to something greater than themselves.

This is illustrated by the example of Max Planck’s endorsement of Einstein for membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1913 despite fundamentally disagreeing with his position on light-quanta. Planck’s proposal contained the following paragraph:

‘In sum, it can be said that among the important problems, which are so abundant in modern physics, there is hardly one in which Einstein did not take a position in a remarkable manner. That he might sometimes have overshot the target in his speculations, as for example in his light-quantum hypothesis, should not be counted against him too much. Because without taking a risk from time to time it is impossible, even in the most exact natural sciences, to introduce real innovations’ (p52)

Not only do we see a remarkable willingness to recommend a fellow scientist despite disagreeing with him but the clear connection between disagreements and risk as critical to scientific advance.

What a stark contrast with today where contestation is regarded as a religious infraction against ‘truth’ (as in the ‘Climategate’ debacle) and where risk is consciously prevented by concentration on what we already know or what Lord Browne thinks can be safely developed. Planck reveals what science is really about in contrast with today’s instrumentalism and manufacture.

THE BEAUTY AND NOBILITY OF SCIENCE

The third and final striking point in the book is the nobility of the young scientists involved in this rich period of scientific discovery. For them, as in the example of Ernest Rutherford, exploiting their research for financial gain was seen as a distraction from the really important goal of making a scientific reputation for themselves. Rutherford who had started working on the detection of ‘wireless’ waves (radio waves) chose instead to pursue his academic passion (in contrast to others working in this field like the Italian Guglielmo Marconi who amassed a fortune).

This is not to suggest that exploiting scientific discoveries were wrong or that the people who did were somehow flawed. Far from it. It highlights how the pursuit of science requires those types of individuals who regard it as a noble calling and are given the freedom to pursue it regardless of measurable outcomes (as we would have it in today’s crude management-speak). Kumar reveals how the young men at the centre of the quantum revolution were driven not only by their own self- belief (and no doubt, huge egos), but also by the pursuit of something greater than material wealth – a belief in scientific and human progress.

Of course that is precisely what is being questioned today, which is why the media concentrates its attention on the exploiters of science rather that present-day pioneers. So the founders of Google are feted for creating Google whereas in the past we would be looking for the scientific contribution they might have made towards humanity’s body of knowledge. Today we celebrate exploitation rather than the wonder of science underpinning these achievements.

The question this raises is how we will ever create a culture that places greater value in the pursuit of knowledge rather than on its results?

As the world discovered through Max Planck, everything had not been explained. Kumar’s book is a great reminder that there is no such thing as natural limits and that the worst dimension of a culture of limits is that it constrains the thing we have an abundance – human ingenuity, perseverance and the noble ability to rise above petty egos, jealousies and parochialism to benefit humanity as a whole.

Kumar’s book is definitely Big Potatoes and should be read widely.

Filed under: R&D and Innovation, Risk and Innovation, Science and Innovation,

March 13, 2010 • 7:03 am 2

REGULATION & INNOVATION: WHEN THE STATE BECOMES A BARRIER

One of my co-authors of BIG POTATOES: the London Manifesto for Innovation, James Woudhuysen and I have just published an article on government and regulation on spiked-online, titled, ‘How the state is a roadblock to progress’ in which we argue that red tape-obsessed, visionless governments are holding back the kind of big and risky innovation society needs today.

This will be a constant theme we hope to expand upon when we launch BIG POTATOES this month. (Watch this space for an imminent announcement!). We concluded the article as follows:

“Innovation however, means making a persistent stab into the unknown. And the unknown cannot be regulated. We cannot routinise what we don’t yet know. Attempts to render technological change more predictable and ‘responsible’ can only mean closing down experiment and exploration.

“Innovation is a risky business. Technological innovation creates new problems, and can even lead to deaths. On the whole, however, mankind solves those new problems. However, the contemporary impeding of innovation through regulation reflects not just the momentary lapse of a government functionary, but a dyed-in-the-wool cultural malaise, a deep antipathy to taking chances, and a fundamental nervousness about spending money on risky enterprises.

“The over-regulation of innovation has acquired its own dynamic. What is now needed isn’t regulatory reform, but a sizeable – if discriminating – bonfire of controls that is more than merely rhetorical. To move Britain and the world forward, the deregulation of innovation is now an urgent imperative.

Filed under: Risk and Innovation, , ,

December 4, 2009 • 1:07 pm 0

THE CORPORATE SHIFT FROM R to D AND SHORTERMISM

A new Booz & Company’s annual study of the world’s biggest corporate R&D spenders, reported on Strategy-business.com, finds that most companies have stuck with their innovation programs despite the recession. While many are boosting spending to compete more effectively in the upturn, the report confirms the shift from Research to Development (as noted on this blog in numerous posts), increased risk-aversion and  short-term pragmatism.

The Booz & Company’s report contains a number of important statistics about R&D spending and the trends underlying these. It found that the world’s biggest innovation spenders increased their R&D spending by 5.7 percent in 2008, a slower rate of growth than the prior year’s 10 percent increase, but in line with the group’s 6.5 percent increase in worldwide sales. On a quantitative level this increase in spending looks impressive given that operating income for the group fell 8.6 percent in 2008, and net income plummeted 34 percent.

More than two-thirds of the companies included in this year’s Global Inno­vation 1000 maintained or increased R&D spending in 2008 despite a third of the companies reporting a financial loss for the year. However, the recession has certainly had an impact.

Recessionary Effects

The Global Innovation 1000 have certainly not been immune to the recession. Overall, they spent $532 billion on R&D in 2008, a healthy 5.7 percent increase over 2007, but well below the 10 percent increase from 2006 to 2007. Total sales were up 6.5 percent, to $15 trillion — but again, it was a significantly smaller increase than the 10 percent gain this same group registered between 2006 and 2007. Thus the group’s R&D intensity — innovation spending as a percentage of sales — remained the same at 3.6 percent.

Not all companies maintained or boosted R&D spending. Caution appears to be high: more than a quarter of the Global In­novation 1000 cut their innovation budgets in 2008 while the top 20 innovation spenders increased re­search and development by only 3.2 percent, compared with 10.7 percent for these companies in the previous year. Further­more, the early evidence indicates that as companies entered 2009, spending on innovation slowed further. This has been fueled by steeper declines in sales and income: among the 522 companies reporting results for the first quarter of 2009, R&D spending decreased by 7.4 percent — which is still less than half the rate of their 18.5 percent decline in sales.

Worrying trends:

Despite the quantitative figures reported, the qualitative trends underlying these trends gives grounds for concern. The report draws three trends out which confirm the most worrying longer-term trends. These are and I quote:

  • As a rule, companies are performing less pure and applied research. Instead, they are concentrating their R&D budgets on product development and engineering. This has been a trend for several years — indeed, 44 percent of survey respondents said they spend less than 20 percent of their R&D budget on basic research and advanced development — but it became even more pronounced during the recession. Managers hope to bring new products to market to take advantage of the upcoming recovery. Nearly 40 percent of respondents said their companies are shifting re­sources from basic research in order to prioritize new product launches.
  • The downturn has encouraged many companies — 40 percent, in our survey — to speed up their efforts to make the innovation process more efficient.
  • In response to the downturn, companies have become more risk averse; nearly half of survey respondents say that their companies are now more conservative than before. Companies are changing the criteria they use when giving new products the green light, tightening their relationships with customers and consumers, and watching their competitors, and the marketplace, more carefully.

The report highlights that every top executive interviewed said their companies are working hard to spend smarter — to get more bang for their R&D buck. What this means is an increased focus on improving the returns on innovation investments, in both the short-term and the long:

  • More than 40 percent of survey respondents said their companies were focusing on process improvements to change R&D spend during the downturn, and a similar number reported that they were getting better at killing bad projects;
  • More than a third of companies surveyed, for instance, said they were terminating more exploratory projects that lacked specific time lines; and,
  • More than 40 percent said their companies were focusing more on newer products that have the potential to grow faster.

While searching for efficiencies is to be expected, like it or not, there is a relentless logic at play here which despite the best intentions can only negatively impact on innovation in the future. Short-termism and pragmatism, trends that were in full evidence before the global recession, are now being entrenched into recession-based management practices. This is best expressed by Alan Grant, senior vice president for R&D in developing markets at Kraft Foods Inc. when he argues as follows:

For the past two or three years, we have been looking at our R&D portfolio, focusing on fewer, bigger ideas as opposed to lots of incremental little things. What the recession has done is change the filters through which we view the portfolio. Which of these products might we bring to the front and which might we choose to back pedal on, given the challenging economic times?

While short-term financial speculation got us into this mess in the first place, this report reveals just how far a short-term, risk averse and pragmatic approach is now being entrenched in the innovation practices of the world’s top global companies. At one level this is inevitable. Recessions focus the mind. But this report highlights how the recession is strengthening a risk-averse, short-term pragmatic business culture which, while recognising the importance of innovation, seems to be powerless to take the longer-term measures to guarantee it into the future.

Filed under: Economics of Innovation, R&D and Innovation, Risk and Innovation

September 30, 2009 • 12:42 pm 2

WATER ON THE MOON – A TONIC FOR INDIAN ASPIRATIONS AND THE FUTURE OF INNOVATION

Luna3 The discovery of significant quantities of water on the surface of the Moon by India’s first unmanned lunar mission Chandrayaan-1 is certainly something to celebrate. This is remarkable for two reasons: first because it has rekindled the dream of establishing a manned Moon base and further exploration deeper into space, particularly to Mars, and second, because it was the result not of a NASA lunar mission, but an Indian one.

Scientists have been baffled for four decades by the fact that rock samples brought back from the moon by the Apollo lunar missions showed evidence of the existence of water on the Moon. They were not sure if this was because there was water on the Moon or that this was the result of contamination from the Earth’s atmosphere. Now there is no question: water ice exists on the Moon – the ‘holy grail for lunar scientists for a very long time’, as  Jim Green, director of the Planetary Science Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington put it. In a statement put out by NASA, he went on to explain how this extraordinary discovery came about:

“This surprising finding has come about through the ingenuity, perseverance and international cooperation between NASA and the India Space Research Organization.”

This cooperation was significant: NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper, or M3, instrument reported the observations. It was carried into space on Oct. 22, 2008, aboard the Indian Space Research Organization’s Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. Data from the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer, or VIMS, on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, and the High-Resolution Infrared Imaging Spectrometer on NASA’s Epoxi spacecraft contributed to confirmation of the finding. The spacecraft imaging spectrometers made it possible to map lunar water more effectively than ever before.

So while NASA still played a significant role in this discovery, the fact that it was an Indian spacecraft is equally significant. India’s lunar programme is a result of the space race emerging between it and China. But whatever the domestic motivations underlying this competition, it highlights how significantly the space exploration field has shifted from West to East. While President Obama contemplates cutting back spending on the US space effort, India and China are surging ahead. We are thus in an era of transition: while a lot of the specialised technological innovation remains the preserve of NASA (given its past investment, innovation and experience), the drive towards pushing the boundaries of exploration are now increasingly coming from the East.

LOOK EAST

This reflects the global shift in economic power from West to East which the current recession has so sharply brought into focus. But more pertinent for the future of innovation, it reveals that this is now accompanied by a significant shift in Eastern aspirations, vision, and a willingness to take risks and push the boundaries of the known further. It suggests that in the same way that the US Space Programme had the unexpected outcome of solving thousands of problems for humanity in the 20th century (see NASA’s spin-off site here), the future of unexpected innovations and problem solving will increasingly come from the East this Century. But far from this representing a problem or being seen as a threat, this should be welcomed, and regarded, as Rob Killick succinctly argues, as an inspiration to us all.

Filed under: Risk and Innovation, Science and Innovation, , ,

September 14, 2009 • 12:30 pm 9

TEDxLeeds: innovating out of the recession

Last week I spoke at the TEDxLeeds event on the recession and innovation, organised by Imran Ali and Herb Kim.

It was a well attended event with a very well-informed and engaged audience and judging by the twitter chatter, (#TEDxLeeds) the event seemed to go down extremely well. (Congrats to Imran and Herb and all involved! See the Ian Forrester’s blog post on cubicgarden.com for another view of the event). What was refreshing was the enthusiasm in the audience for challenging the existing culture of limits and low expectations. The points about the need for more risk-taking and greater experimentation, and opposition to the contemporary business culture of short-term pragmatism versus longer-term investment in research, appeared to resonate with a large section of the audience.This highlights that this is the time to develop bold new arguments for why we need

  • more long-term investment in research (as opposed to the short-term funding of development);
  • more experimentation and less emphasis upon predictable outcomes driven by narrow ROI considerations; and
  • more failure to build success.

Watch this space!

Below are some of the slides I used during my presentation. The key points should be obvious. But in case the Kennedy and Moon slides confuse, my point was simply that the US Space Program (despite being rooted in the politics of the Cold War) provided a bold vision and impetus to the generation of ground-breaking new research and innovation. The research created new industries while NASA provided impetus for the formation of thousands of new companies and product innovation. It is this kind of boldness that is so noticeably absent in our society today.

(This presentation has been selected amongst the ‘Top Presentations of the Day’ on the SlideShare homepage).

Filed under: R&D and Innovation, Risk and Innovation, , ,

About futures-diagnosis

Categories

Archive

Follow me on Twitter

My del.icio.us tags

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.