It is well established, and the notion is universally accepted that new inventions such as the car, the refrigerator and the television broadcast have had a substantive impact on the economies of nations like it happened to the American economy in the first part of the Twentieth Century when the country grew to the status of an industrial powerhouse. On the other hand, it is also undeniable that to worship innovation as an end in itself in the belief that to do so will rejuvenate a moribund economy will instead turn the exercise into a farce such as happened to the Japanese economy in the latter part of the same Century when that economy was supposed to produce a “new invention every day” but produced gizmos of little interest and stagnated for a decade. It is obvious, therefore, that a divide exists between the necessity to innovate and the chance that the pursuit may turn detrimental. Thus, a closer look at the subject is called for where all matters need to be parsed and examined as closely as possible.
The problem is that when we engage in a debate of this nature, the question as to what an innovation is worth intrudes into the discussion and confuses the debate. To clarify the problem as much as I can I shall recount an incident that happened to me once. I used to own a small school that had a cafeteria which I and the teachers shared with the students. I entered the cafeteria one day to get a coffee while two groups of students were having a heated discussion. One group was saying that some of the music put out these days was bad music not worth listening to, and the other group was saying that all music is good music; you just have to get used to it. Upon seeing me, the students asked that I settle the argument for them. This happened at a time when I was working 18 hours a day 7 days a week and had no time to listen to music or be exposed to anything that was not math formulas or electronic circuits which required that I be entirely immersed in them in total silence. Also, I lived at a 5 minutes walk from the school thus had no opportunity to drive a car where I could have listened to music on the radio. Consequently, I was the person least qualified to tackle that subject but for some reason became tongue-tied and did not excuse myself from accepting the task of moderating the discussion. And so I took up the challenge having no idea what I was supposed to do.
Luckily, the students defined the task for me. The group that was saying all music was good music wanted me to confirm that some of the music created in past centuries was considered bad music but then became mainstream even went on to become great classical pieces. The other group wanted me to confirm that some of the music created while I was growing up must have been bad music, and that we do not listen to it today or talk about it because no one would spend money to buy it or waste their time listening to it. Seeing how serious the two groups were and not wanting to disappoint them by admitting I had no interest in what they were talking about, I took my time to pull a chair, sit down, pour sugar in the coffee and slowly stir it while thinking how I was going to get out of my predicament. Furthermore, I did not want to favor one side over the other because I knew that if I did this, I will never be rid of the losing side which will forever try to convince me I must change my mind and tell it to the other side. And so, while I was doing my deep thinking, the students were deep in believing that I was weighing the two sides of their argument, and they looked delighted that I was taking them seriously. But I needed an answer in a hurry and was surprised by the luck that visited me at that moment. It is that a flash heralding the birth of a brilliant idea lit up the inner sanctum of my brain where the students could not see the tumult that was taking place there. The flash was truly a eureka moment and a triumph for the adage that says: Necessity is the mother of invention.
Now came the time to transmit my discovery to the students which I did with relief and delight. I told them that in past centuries as well as during the decades when I was growing up, music along with other works of art and technological inventions were created by all sorts of people. What was good from among these works withstood the test of time and survived to enchant future generations including theirs and mine. In the meantime, the works that had little or no merit were relegated to the bins of oblivion. I went on to say that likewise, some of the music, the works of art and the inventions created today will withstand the test of time and may become the classics of tomorrow while the rest will be forgotten. As always, it is the public at large that will determine what should survive and what must be forgotten. And they, who are students today, will tomorrow be in a position of great influence and they will share in the making of those decisions thus help to shape the culture that they and their descendants will live in. For this reason they should be honest with themselves and express their true opinion about the worth of something, not be influenced by what someone else says. I then added a caveat to be on the side of caution. I said that there have been instances when artists and inventors were ahead of their time; these were people who created works that were not appreciated while they lived but gained wide recognition after their death. I went on to explain that these were rare occasions that must not be used to make sweeping statements such as to say all music is good music or that all technology is bad technology. To my relief the students expressed acceptance of this rendition and I was rid of my predicament at long last.
Even though I whipped up that lecture on the spot to respond to a momentary need, it got me thinking about the creative process because my response was an act of creation that came about spontaneously. The first observation I must make, therefore, is that the most authentic of the creative acts are those that happen spontaneously. They come about during moments when inside the deepest part of the brain a number of elements are energized for a reason I do not always understand, and they fuse together through a process I cannot explain. But like the fusion of atoms, they give off an explosive brilliance of light and energy that forever shine in the works that they create, be that a piece of art, a theory that deciphers a secret of nature or a useful product. Each of these moments would be a eureka moment that may or may not equal the discovery of Archimedes but should be filed under the same category nonetheless.
All this is fine, you might say, but what about the acts of creation that do not rely on spontaneity for them to happen but are meticulously engineered and consciously put together one small piece at a time? Before I answer this question I must hypothesize that there is a spectrum of ideas with two extremes between which all creations can be classified. At one end of the spectrum sit the spontaneously created acts such as the eureka moments described above. At the other end sit the Research and Development (R&D) such as the engineering works that are done in industry all the time. And in the space between the two extremes sit an array of works that are part scientific discovery and part engineering development.
This is getting so complicated we might as well pause for a moment and ask if this is not just an exercise in sophistry. Can all this be an elegant intellectual engagement for which there is no practical use? To answer the question we first recognize that the modern world runs on ideas and this is why a great deal of funding is made available by government and by private enterprise supposedly to go to the people who come up with new ideas. However, it is hard enough, as pointed out already, to evaluate the ideas after they have been formulated; and you can imagine how much harder it is to evaluate them before they have been formulated. This tells us that the people who are in charge of deciding who has priority and who gets what level of funding need a reliable method by which to evaluate ideas before much effort or any money have been put into them. Thus, having a spectrum of ideas as described should go some distance toward helping the decision makers see where things stand. That is why this discussion is far from being an idle engagement in sophistry. In fact, being a tool whose use can make the difference between the practice of good governance and that of bad governance, a codified version of the spectrum should be included in every course on governance. This is just my humble opinion.
And so when it comes to putting down a comprehensive strategy to develop or rejuvenate a nation that has fallen on hard times, the first thing you must be aware of is that you cannot evoke eureka moments with incentives or with predetermined rewards. A eureka moment is something that happens spontaneously when it is least expected. Its advent is sometimes triggered by a deeply seated need to find a way out of a predicament but the act itself is its own reward and does not respond to an external stimulus or anticipate an external reward. Thus, to dedicate funds for the purpose of encouraging the conception of eureka moments is to show a lack of understanding as to how the creative process works; it is a waste of the funds. What you must do instead is wait for the baby to come about by spontaneous birth then reward the parent with what you deem to be adequate at the time. And while you're at it, you must guard against the tendency to view what is created spontaneously as being something cheap. Too many people subscribe to this idea, and this is why the creators of eureka moments are often robbed of their ideas. If anything, the government must do all it can in terms of legislation to protect the creators of ideas, not only the end users of intellectual property who might have acquired the thing cheaply or might have stolen it.
We now look at the other end of the spectrum, the end where there is more painstaking development and less spontaneity. Here we see that big engineering projects are necessary for the proper development of a country. Consequently, where the science already exists and where most of the technology to realize the coveted project is here, the government or big business or both can step in and fund such a project without further ado. Whether it is the building of a network of highways destined to crisscross the country or it is the sending of a man to the moon, what will be required from the technical point of view are several things taking place at the same time. A group of systems will be assembled while another group will be developed and still another group will be researched. When everything is ready, all systems will be put together and made to work as a single unit. At first, the unit may not work as well as hoped for but when the bugs are ironed out the performance will improve. As for the evaluation of the project, this will be determined by its practical use and the political dividend it will yield. This is when we'll know if the exercise was worth it.
Having a way to deal with the two ends of the spectrum, we need a way to deal with everything that may fall between the two extremes. These would be products or concepts such as an electric car, a windmill or a digital broadcast that are part eureka moment and part R&D where the R can vary from being minimal to being maximal. To tackle this point intelligently, we first need to better define that R. Unlike the eureka moment where a discovery happens spontaneously, research relies on a prescribed method to arrive at the correct result. For example, logic tells you that to work well, the blade of a windmill must be twisted to a certain angle. You know that a small angle will not be enough but a large angle will be too much. And so, as a research engineer, you set out to find the angle that will yield the best performance. You do this by varying the angle progressively and measuring the resulting torque. You do several tests and draw up a chart to represent the accumulated results. But while conducting these tests, you discover something new. You discover that the chart is good for only one steady speed of the wind. When the wind speed changes, the performance of the blade changes and the chart is no longer valid. This says you must now make a family of charts for a series of wind speeds each of which will be a small increment above the other. And since you cannot rely on nature to give you the right wind speed when you need it, you construct a wind tunnel to generate the speeds that you must have when you must have them. You see, therefore, that what started out as a simple exercise has mushroomed into a big and expensive one. This is what is meant by doing research; the R in R&D. It is a process of meticulously chosen steps that go hand in hand with development. The process is based on a series of small eureka moments that tell the research engineer how to proceed with the development every step of the way especially when the unexpected pops up and demands attention such as the discovery that when the wind speed changes the angle of the blade is no longer the correct one.
Now step back ten or fifteen years when the windmills were in their infancy and little was known about their performance. Imagine yourself having to decide how much the nation should support the future generation of electricity by windmills, and how much money you should allocate to back the associated projects. How would you have proceeded to make such a decision? Well, most of the large companies that build expensive equipments (for example those in the field of transportation, those used in hospitals and those destined for space exploration) make this kind of decisions all the time. What the companies do is begin by funding some tests then go on to fund a prototype then go on to fund the final product. That is, they take a small risk with the expenses at first, and the more the project meets with success the more they increase the level of funding. But if no success is shown, the people who make the decision do not fall in love with the project; they junk it in no time at all and get behind another project.
What this shows is that there is a well established procedure and no problem, right? No, not quite. The fact is that a problem does exist and it can sometimes become a serious one. What happens is that to get the government to fund something you must go through a bureaucratic procedure which, unlike the technical procedure, is a veritable nightmare. And this is where things usually go wrong as they get hung up on the question as to what an innovation is worth now or will be in the future when it has not yet been formulated. In the melee, good ideas end up being rejected because while they are presented by people who have the right technical skills, these people would not have mastered the language of the bureaucracy. At the same time, bad ideas end up being subsidized because while they are presented by people who have the wrong technical skills, these people would have mastered the language of the bureaucracy. As a result, the good ideas get stolen, maybe even get shipped out of the country, and the bad ideas go onto the list of those eligible for subsidy. And they remain there for ever and ever.
I do not know how to solve this last problem so I leave it to others to take up the debate from this point forward.