So taking innovation as being synonymous with progress, denuded of the political overtones - how is innovation possible?
Firstly - we need to know what we know. We need our best existing knowledge. Only knowledge already created can be improved. Despite what some think, great leaps in innovation - what have been called “paradigm shifts” in some academic circles - are the rare exception. Reflecting here for a moment: consider what is now known as the Copernican “Revolution”. How revolutionary was the original idea? Consider what went before: the ancients had (mainly!) taught that the Earth was at the centre of the universe. And around the Earth orbited all of the planets, stars, Sun and Moon. This “geocentric” theory was not universally subscribed to, but it seemed to have the greatest support among the experts. The great authority “Ptolomy” used mathematics to predict the movement of celestial bodies to high precision.
Then in 1543 the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus suggested a “radical” idea: a “revolution” - a total “paradigm shift”. He suggested that the centre of everything be replaced. Instead of the Earth - the Sun should be moved to the focus of the universe. And around this the Earth became just another orbiting body.
But was that so momentous? Well yes. And no. Yes: it had the social effect of regarding people as not at the astronomical centre of things. Yes: it eventually lead others like Galileo and Newton to develop more refined scientific theories that enabled careful predictions to be made. And no: it is not such a huge change. It is swapping one body (the Earth) for another (the Sun). But in terms of astronomy - this is no huge advance. It eliminated details like Ptolomy’s superfluous epicycles and the theory was therefore simpler in a crucial respect. But the planets were still in (circular) orbits. There was something at the focus. Most of the “terrain” of the solar system remained unchanged as did the paths the planets followed. In terms of the science: the innovation was an incremental one. As for a “paradigm shift” - well we could argue either way about that. How big must a change be to be an entire “paradigm” shift?
Let us consider a closely related story - also from physics - that might deserve the title more: that of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity (GR). GR replaced Newton’s theory of gravity in many ways. First among them: what was once a force (gravity), became no longer a force. What was once an unalterable background (space and time) in Newton's theory became a dynamic, twisting fabric in GR. And yet not everything was lost: planets still orbited stars, masses still moved towards each other seemingly attracted together. So although many things were rejected in the new physics - not everything was lost. Here the change was, perhaps, not incremental. So too we might say with Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection. But even there: it was not creation ex-nihlio. People knew about evolution. And they knew about artificial selection. It did indeed take the genius of Darwin to fill in the gaps - but the gaps were not as huge or numerous as some might imagine. And today neo-Darwinism - the idea that genes are the unit of selection - looks rather different to Darwin’s original idea and yet few speak of a “paradigm shift” that has occurred in biology since Darwin in the field of evolution. Because to understand the progress that has happened in that field it is better to view the gradual accumulation of knowledge as an incremental process of improvement through refinement, discovery and criticism through experiment and other means. That way of viewing innovation more broadly is what can be recommended to both people and organisations.
Paradigm shifts are the rare exception in science and knowledge more broadly. Scientific revolutions, if they happen at all, happen with the frequency of political revolutions. Rare punctuations in the equilibria of rich, diverse and stable societies. Most of the work of building societies that continue to flourish over decades and centuries happens between the violent confrontations and sudden wholesale changes. Abrupt upheavals can bring with them negative consequences - often violence. But critical rationalism tempers this. It cautions that incremental progress is best for improvements to occur. Positive things happen when error correction is fast - but this can only happen if it is slow enough for the errors to actually be noticed in time to be corrected and not ignored or missed and so compounded.
So revolutions are rare. If we look to the history of chemistry, for example, the current state of affairs is a result of gradual, incremental change, year on year, to existing knowledge. If we look at the current iteration of iPhones from Apple - each generation is an incremental increase on the first. And the very first iPhone? It was an innovation: but it was not a wholesale invention ex nihlio. It too was an incremental increase over many pre-existing technologies. From the UNIX based software embedded deep in its operating system, through to the wireless technology in the hardware and the silicon chips common to many phones. Some of those increases were more or less larger than others and many new changes were incorporated into one device. But we should not be mislead into thinking innovation always requires something completely new from the ground up. Such a state of affairs is almost never the case.
More typically innovation is the gradual delving into what we do not know from what we do know. It is the taking of a single idea and changing it. Hopefully for that better. And if it is better: that’s progress. Precisely how this step from existing knowledge to better knowledge happens in a single human mind: we do not know. But we do know it is very much a defining human capacity. Indeed in nature we see evolution attempting innovations. But these happen unconsciously and haphazardly. And take much much longer. And nature, though it can respond to changes, cannot adapt to change like creative people can.
Knowledge innovation among humans is orders of magnitude faster that anything we see in nature. And this, by the way is why hoping artificial intelligence will spontaneously arise from some evolutionary algorithm is so profoundly misguided (for more on that, see here). We may wait millions or billions of years or forever (such as happens in nature) or we will understand intelligence first and then program it. And although it is the undirected alteration of existing ideas: the creative mind of a person is able to criticise a bad idea and sift the successful thoughts from those that are not so good. Success is frequently, but not always, the measure of positivity among ideas.
So what is required for innovation? Firstly a robust understanding of the field you intend to innovate within. So you want to be an innovative computer programmer designing new games? You will need to know about the existing computer games...and the programming language(s) used to code those games. You will need to know something about computer hardware, and physics. You will need to know something about the preferences of people who play computer games. And you need to know a bit about critical thinking: how to decide if your new idea is a good idea. This can be hard - but to pretend we know nothing at all about how to sift the better ideas from the worse ideas is a recipe for failure. This is positive philosophy: how to decide among your choices as to what is better or worse.
Part 4: Innovate Fast. Innovate Often. Innovate Incrementally.
Firstly - we need to know what we know. We need our best existing knowledge. Only knowledge already created can be improved. Despite what some think, great leaps in innovation - what have been called “paradigm shifts” in some academic circles - are the rare exception. Reflecting here for a moment: consider what is now known as the Copernican “Revolution”. How revolutionary was the original idea? Consider what went before: the ancients had (mainly!) taught that the Earth was at the centre of the universe. And around the Earth orbited all of the planets, stars, Sun and Moon. This “geocentric” theory was not universally subscribed to, but it seemed to have the greatest support among the experts. The great authority “Ptolomy” used mathematics to predict the movement of celestial bodies to high precision.
Then in 1543 the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus suggested a “radical” idea: a “revolution” - a total “paradigm shift”. He suggested that the centre of everything be replaced. Instead of the Earth - the Sun should be moved to the focus of the universe. And around this the Earth became just another orbiting body.
But was that so momentous? Well yes. And no. Yes: it had the social effect of regarding people as not at the astronomical centre of things. Yes: it eventually lead others like Galileo and Newton to develop more refined scientific theories that enabled careful predictions to be made. And no: it is not such a huge change. It is swapping one body (the Earth) for another (the Sun). But in terms of astronomy - this is no huge advance. It eliminated details like Ptolomy’s superfluous epicycles and the theory was therefore simpler in a crucial respect. But the planets were still in (circular) orbits. There was something at the focus. Most of the “terrain” of the solar system remained unchanged as did the paths the planets followed. In terms of the science: the innovation was an incremental one. As for a “paradigm shift” - well we could argue either way about that. How big must a change be to be an entire “paradigm” shift?
Let us consider a closely related story - also from physics - that might deserve the title more: that of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity (GR). GR replaced Newton’s theory of gravity in many ways. First among them: what was once a force (gravity), became no longer a force. What was once an unalterable background (space and time) in Newton's theory became a dynamic, twisting fabric in GR. And yet not everything was lost: planets still orbited stars, masses still moved towards each other seemingly attracted together. So although many things were rejected in the new physics - not everything was lost. Here the change was, perhaps, not incremental. So too we might say with Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection. But even there: it was not creation ex-nihlio. People knew about evolution. And they knew about artificial selection. It did indeed take the genius of Darwin to fill in the gaps - but the gaps were not as huge or numerous as some might imagine. And today neo-Darwinism - the idea that genes are the unit of selection - looks rather different to Darwin’s original idea and yet few speak of a “paradigm shift” that has occurred in biology since Darwin in the field of evolution. Because to understand the progress that has happened in that field it is better to view the gradual accumulation of knowledge as an incremental process of improvement through refinement, discovery and criticism through experiment and other means. That way of viewing innovation more broadly is what can be recommended to both people and organisations.
Paradigm shifts are the rare exception in science and knowledge more broadly. Scientific revolutions, if they happen at all, happen with the frequency of political revolutions. Rare punctuations in the equilibria of rich, diverse and stable societies. Most of the work of building societies that continue to flourish over decades and centuries happens between the violent confrontations and sudden wholesale changes. Abrupt upheavals can bring with them negative consequences - often violence. But critical rationalism tempers this. It cautions that incremental progress is best for improvements to occur. Positive things happen when error correction is fast - but this can only happen if it is slow enough for the errors to actually be noticed in time to be corrected and not ignored or missed and so compounded.
So revolutions are rare. If we look to the history of chemistry, for example, the current state of affairs is a result of gradual, incremental change, year on year, to existing knowledge. If we look at the current iteration of iPhones from Apple - each generation is an incremental increase on the first. And the very first iPhone? It was an innovation: but it was not a wholesale invention ex nihlio. It too was an incremental increase over many pre-existing technologies. From the UNIX based software embedded deep in its operating system, through to the wireless technology in the hardware and the silicon chips common to many phones. Some of those increases were more or less larger than others and many new changes were incorporated into one device. But we should not be mislead into thinking innovation always requires something completely new from the ground up. Such a state of affairs is almost never the case.
More typically innovation is the gradual delving into what we do not know from what we do know. It is the taking of a single idea and changing it. Hopefully for that better. And if it is better: that’s progress. Precisely how this step from existing knowledge to better knowledge happens in a single human mind: we do not know. But we do know it is very much a defining human capacity. Indeed in nature we see evolution attempting innovations. But these happen unconsciously and haphazardly. And take much much longer. And nature, though it can respond to changes, cannot adapt to change like creative people can.
Knowledge innovation among humans is orders of magnitude faster that anything we see in nature. And this, by the way is why hoping artificial intelligence will spontaneously arise from some evolutionary algorithm is so profoundly misguided (for more on that, see here). We may wait millions or billions of years or forever (such as happens in nature) or we will understand intelligence first and then program it. And although it is the undirected alteration of existing ideas: the creative mind of a person is able to criticise a bad idea and sift the successful thoughts from those that are not so good. Success is frequently, but not always, the measure of positivity among ideas.
So what is required for innovation? Firstly a robust understanding of the field you intend to innovate within. So you want to be an innovative computer programmer designing new games? You will need to know about the existing computer games...and the programming language(s) used to code those games. You will need to know something about computer hardware, and physics. You will need to know something about the preferences of people who play computer games. And you need to know a bit about critical thinking: how to decide if your new idea is a good idea. This can be hard - but to pretend we know nothing at all about how to sift the better ideas from the worse ideas is a recipe for failure. This is positive philosophy: how to decide among your choices as to what is better or worse.
Part 4: Innovate Fast. Innovate Often. Innovate Incrementally.