I’m invariably asked a question to which I have a pretty poor answer: how can my research on the causes of innovation — and the unprecedented and dramatic acceleration of innovation in Britain in sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in particular — be applied to today? What are the policy implications, exactly?
All the inventors I know started as kids taking things (technology/machines) apart and had parents that either turned a blind eye to the destruction or encouraged the exploration - even if the parents weren't technical or driven to understand how stuff works. Bringing that to fruition in a successful profession would definitely be helped by interaction with those that knew the ropes of design, funding, obtaining patents, business...Modern fads in education are doing their level best to quash the drive to think why, how and to take stuff apart to see how it works.
Would you say that the skills, experience and character that one might find on those motivated to invent complements or contradicts those skills and personal qualities that one might find in a successful entrepreneur?
What is the relation between innovation and invention? I suggest that they are different, and that only some innovation is the result of an invention. This, from Wikipedia:
'Innovation is related to, but not the same as, invention:[4] innovation is more apt to involve the practical implementation of an invention (i.e. new / improved ability) to make a meaningful impact in a market or society,[5] and not all innovations require a new invention.[6]'
[4] Bhasin, Kim (2 April 2012). "This Is The Difference Between 'Invention' And 'Innovation'". Business Insider.
[5] "What's the Difference Between Invention and Innovation?", Forbes, 10 September 2015.
[6] Schumpeter, Joseph Alois (1939). Business Cycles. 1. p. 84. Innovation is possible without anything we should identify as invention, and invention does not necessarily induce innovation.
A feature that I find often missed in the discussion of invention, is the process itself. Much is made of the personal qualities required to invent, or the scientific, engineering or entrepreneurial skills required to realise an objective, but not the formal framework that will support one's efforts to have a really good idea in the first place. I don't often see the inventive frameworks explicitly taught. My own enthusiasm for a formal inventive process seems almost niche in the large engineering organisation for whom I work. Perhaps people don't engage with invention because they have never been taught how.
A true inventor like myself can see it in their mind, not all parts put when the parts all come together then you know you are an inventor,..Then ask your self can I invent something else, and if you do you are an inventor.
Another movie for your list: "Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story". However improbable it may seem, it turns out that she was an important inventor, not just a Hollywood actress. Her Wikipedia page summarizes her work, but the movie is worth watching.
I remember when "Popular Science" magazine was being read with interest by schoolchildren, and they were encouraged to do so by teachers, parents, etc. No doubt there still is young people curious about progress, but it does seem to me that a culture of doom and gloom and misanthropy is producing relatively more Greta Thunbergs and relatively fewer Elon Musks. I am one of those who think this negativity is a disgrace to the human spirit, and potentially a self-fulfilling prophecy in the wrong direction. I agree with the conclusion of Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist", that the only thing we need to really worry about, is self-fulfilling negativity. Much that is the subject of pessimism should be regarded as challenges that we are more than capable of handling. If the youth were being saturated with this mindset instead of revolutionary "burn down the system" zeal, it would help.
This is a wonderful and largely overlooked perspective on invention. So much public policy seems to focus on macroeconomic variables -- capital cost, taxation. So little seems to attend to the microeconomic details -- alone or in a group? If a group, what size group? How homogeneous? With what goals?
I don't have the scope of your perspective, but from my own experience and limited knowledge, I do perceive that exceptional invention requires a critical mass of inventors with some degree of physical colocation. Humans are innately competitive, but inventing is a game that is hard to score. Yet if you put enough inventors together in the same place, they will figure out who is coming up with original and interesting ideas, and then try to best them.
There is still an element of this in the startups competing in Silicon Valley. But the partition of IP rights among them interferes with the sort of direct collaborations that occurred at Bell Labs or IBM ARC in their heydays. Stanford and Berkeley have partially, but not completely, provided a substitute public forum.
I recently finished A Man for All Markets by Ed Thorp. Thorp is an accomplished inventor, and his life story provides some important hints about where our inventors might be in the U.S. today. As a boy, he spent his time studying chemistry and physics, pulling mostly harmless pranks and blowing things up. As a grad student and post doc he developed a new system for counting cards and (with Claude Shannon) a wearable computer for winning roulette. But by the time he was a Prof., the temptation of financial innovation and its potentially more lucrative rewards had drawn him into building a hedge fund.
I believe the same story has played out tens, and maybe hundreds of thousands of times with would-be inventors of mechanical, chemical, medical, computer, and other technology over the past 50 years in the U.S. After communism was defeated, there was no longer a sense of urgency or deep purpose in building better spy planes or rockets. Capitalism had won; why not join the capitalists?
If that's correct, then at least part of what is missing is an inspiring vision of the future,.of what we might achieve if we all worked together, each building something new.
The English in some cases seemed propelled by (a mis) reading of Darwin into a version of what we in the U.S. called "manifest destiny" through much of industrialization. Of course it's impossible to know how much that influenced individual choices. But from reading Strachey's Eminent Victorians at least, one has a sense that the same sort of zeitgeist that existed in cold war era R&D labs in the US might have been there in English colonial aspirations.
All the inventors I know started as kids taking things (technology/machines) apart and had parents that either turned a blind eye to the destruction or encouraged the exploration - even if the parents weren't technical or driven to understand how stuff works. Bringing that to fruition in a successful profession would definitely be helped by interaction with those that knew the ropes of design, funding, obtaining patents, business...Modern fads in education are doing their level best to quash the drive to think why, how and to take stuff apart to see how it works.
Would you say that the skills, experience and character that one might find on those motivated to invent complements or contradicts those skills and personal qualities that one might find in a successful entrepreneur?
What is the relation between innovation and invention? I suggest that they are different, and that only some innovation is the result of an invention. This, from Wikipedia:
'Innovation is related to, but not the same as, invention:[4] innovation is more apt to involve the practical implementation of an invention (i.e. new / improved ability) to make a meaningful impact in a market or society,[5] and not all innovations require a new invention.[6]'
[4] Bhasin, Kim (2 April 2012). "This Is The Difference Between 'Invention' And 'Innovation'". Business Insider.
[5] "What's the Difference Between Invention and Innovation?", Forbes, 10 September 2015.
[6] Schumpeter, Joseph Alois (1939). Business Cycles. 1. p. 84. Innovation is possible without anything we should identify as invention, and invention does not necessarily induce innovation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innovation
A feature that I find often missed in the discussion of invention, is the process itself. Much is made of the personal qualities required to invent, or the scientific, engineering or entrepreneurial skills required to realise an objective, but not the formal framework that will support one's efforts to have a really good idea in the first place. I don't often see the inventive frameworks explicitly taught. My own enthusiasm for a formal inventive process seems almost niche in the large engineering organisation for whom I work. Perhaps people don't engage with invention because they have never been taught how.
Chain Reaction 1996
A true inventor like myself can see it in their mind, not all parts put when the parts all come together then you know you are an inventor,..Then ask your self can I invent something else, and if you do you are an inventor.
Another movie for your list: "Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story". However improbable it may seem, it turns out that she was an important inventor, not just a Hollywood actress. Her Wikipedia page summarizes her work, but the movie is worth watching.
I remember when "Popular Science" magazine was being read with interest by schoolchildren, and they were encouraged to do so by teachers, parents, etc. No doubt there still is young people curious about progress, but it does seem to me that a culture of doom and gloom and misanthropy is producing relatively more Greta Thunbergs and relatively fewer Elon Musks. I am one of those who think this negativity is a disgrace to the human spirit, and potentially a self-fulfilling prophecy in the wrong direction. I agree with the conclusion of Matt Ridley's "The Rational Optimist", that the only thing we need to really worry about, is self-fulfilling negativity. Much that is the subject of pessimism should be regarded as challenges that we are more than capable of handling. If the youth were being saturated with this mindset instead of revolutionary "burn down the system" zeal, it would help.
This is a wonderful and largely overlooked perspective on invention. So much public policy seems to focus on macroeconomic variables -- capital cost, taxation. So little seems to attend to the microeconomic details -- alone or in a group? If a group, what size group? How homogeneous? With what goals?
I don't have the scope of your perspective, but from my own experience and limited knowledge, I do perceive that exceptional invention requires a critical mass of inventors with some degree of physical colocation. Humans are innately competitive, but inventing is a game that is hard to score. Yet if you put enough inventors together in the same place, they will figure out who is coming up with original and interesting ideas, and then try to best them.
There is still an element of this in the startups competing in Silicon Valley. But the partition of IP rights among them interferes with the sort of direct collaborations that occurred at Bell Labs or IBM ARC in their heydays. Stanford and Berkeley have partially, but not completely, provided a substitute public forum.
I recently finished A Man for All Markets by Ed Thorp. Thorp is an accomplished inventor, and his life story provides some important hints about where our inventors might be in the U.S. today. As a boy, he spent his time studying chemistry and physics, pulling mostly harmless pranks and blowing things up. As a grad student and post doc he developed a new system for counting cards and (with Claude Shannon) a wearable computer for winning roulette. But by the time he was a Prof., the temptation of financial innovation and its potentially more lucrative rewards had drawn him into building a hedge fund.
I believe the same story has played out tens, and maybe hundreds of thousands of times with would-be inventors of mechanical, chemical, medical, computer, and other technology over the past 50 years in the U.S. After communism was defeated, there was no longer a sense of urgency or deep purpose in building better spy planes or rockets. Capitalism had won; why not join the capitalists?
If that's correct, then at least part of what is missing is an inspiring vision of the future,.of what we might achieve if we all worked together, each building something new.
The English in some cases seemed propelled by (a mis) reading of Darwin into a version of what we in the U.S. called "manifest destiny" through much of industrialization. Of course it's impossible to know how much that influenced individual choices. But from reading Strachey's Eminent Victorians at least, one has a sense that the same sort of zeitgeist that existed in cold war era R&D labs in the US might have been there in English colonial aspirations.