Where Innovation Lives
In “The Sovereign Individual” (Dale and Rees-Mogg, 1999), it states “The basic causes of change are precisely those that are not subject to conscious control.”
There are many layers of truth to this quote. In an almost prophetic line later in the book, it is also written:
“An eruption of microparasites, such as a viral pandemic, rather than drastic changes in climate or topography, would more likely disrupt the megapolitical predominance of technology.”
Wilbur Wright famously said in 1901 “Not in a thousand years will man ever fly” despite working on a prototype aircraft at that exact time, just two years before the brothers’ historic achievement at Kitty Hawk.
Finally, Nassim Taleb states in “Fooled by Randomness” (2001) that “No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word.”
I’ve selected these three quotes out of an innumerable amount on this broader topic - the randomness and chance affecting success and innovation - because of the length of time between them and the different industry contexts they were made in. If we really wanted to extend the time horizon, we could look to the ancient Greeks over two Millennia earlier. The illumination of chance and randomness in the process of innovation would be the same, because it is an intrinsically human social tendency.
Simultaneously, many in the technology industry and in local and national Governments around the world are smitten with the idea of building ‘the next Silicon Valley’. Yet, they simultaneously enact policies which are totally counterproductive to achieving this aim. Just look at GDPR. Look at wealth taxes. Look at National Insurance. Look at business rates. More often than not, organisations do things which deter innovation rather than encourage it - and this seems to increase in occurrence as organisations increase in size.
People often use the word ‘collaboration’ as a sort of evergreen positive descriptor, and the old addage “If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together” or words to that effect are prolific on the motivational posters which plague office environments the world over. The reality is that the optimal size of organisations is decreasing as technology empowers individuals and small teams.
The technology industry in the USA is increasingly looking to Miami and Austin as its next centres of activity as the Government of San Francisco and California do as much as possible to deter risk takers, dreamers and hard workers. Unchallenged crime and a plethora of anti-entrepeneurial policies are finally beginning to have their intended effect, and the migration is starting. At the micro level, most entrepreneurs do things which are just as counterproductive to their individual business, and of those that survive the startup stage, many slow down or fizzle as they age and lose momentum.
Innovation exists as small cell cultures inside a large, fertile petri dish. The experiment must be run many times and have ample reagents to produce the best results. The scientist in charge should not interfere while the reaction is taking place, and if the reaction produces an organism which grows large enough, it may well hop to another petri dish once it has overstayed its welcome in its original host environment…
Thumbnail image by: Ilariac2008t, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
