Yes, it seems like a good story. Ridley does cover toilets in his book. I bet he would be pleased with the example you provide.
Marcosays:
Not sure if I agree with the interpretations of invent and innovate, I think scientists discover more than invent.
Interesting is also the theme that innovation is competitive. Awarding a prize to only the first team to reach a milestone is probably unfair to those who came second. To encourage more innovation, perhaps they all should be supported and rewarded. Cue the basic living wage?
If innovation it seems requires collaboration, why do we limit it to being a team sport? Would innovation be stifled if everything was opened and shared, as in a global team?
Concerning identifying innovators by looking at patents, this is definitely not reliable. I have seen a company assign inventorship of patents to otherwise uninvolved employees in other parts of the world, so they can access R&D concessions from government innovation programs that exist in those other jurisdictions.
Whether Maxwell’s laws were invented or discovered is an interesting philosophical consideration, but I don’t think it interacts with the issue of innovation.
I take your general point to be about credit attribution. A few things about that:
It is undeniably difficult to attribute credit and nothing is even the result of one person’s work.
The folks getting credit only ever get a small compensation compared to the value of the innovation. Yet they often took large risks.
A small number of people contribute a lot more to innovation. It is a power law. Most people play it is safe. Only a few outliers try new techniques.
The latter point is important. You talk about fairness, but it cuts the other way. All medical experts knew or should have know about antibiotics by 1940. How many of them were working to deploy them at large? Very, very few. They just stood still while others where doing all of the work.
It is true today. Take any field where innovation is occurring and you will find that the bulk of the people from this field are just busy reaping the immediate rewards of their work, and they do little to push innovations. Very often, they will openly oppose innovations because it threatens the profitable approach they have going right now. Yet when the innovations will have arrived, they or their children will benefit.
It is definitively not the case that innovations are over-rewarded. If it was the case, then everyone would try to be an innovator… but these people are very uncommon.
I’d summarize the three conditions for innovation as 1. a problem, 2. resources, and 3. feedback.
My favourite “recent” Canadian innovation includes both the “feedback” and “government contracts” ideas: Bill Gauley and MaP testing for toilets.
I too am a fan of Matt Ridley. Unlike most biologists, he sees the parallels between Darwin’s Tangled Bank and Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand.
Yes, it seems like a good story. Ridley does cover toilets in his book. I bet he would be pleased with the example you provide.
Not sure if I agree with the interpretations of invent and innovate, I think scientists discover more than invent.
Interesting is also the theme that innovation is competitive. Awarding a prize to only the first team to reach a milestone is probably unfair to those who came second. To encourage more innovation, perhaps they all should be supported and rewarded. Cue the basic living wage?
If innovation it seems requires collaboration, why do we limit it to being a team sport? Would innovation be stifled if everything was opened and shared, as in a global team?
Concerning identifying innovators by looking at patents, this is definitely not reliable. I have seen a company assign inventorship of patents to otherwise uninvolved employees in other parts of the world, so they can access R&D concessions from government innovation programs that exist in those other jurisdictions.
Whether Maxwell’s laws were invented or discovered is an interesting philosophical consideration, but I don’t think it interacts with the issue of innovation.
I take your general point to be about credit attribution. A few things about that:
It is undeniably difficult to attribute credit and nothing is even the result of one person’s work.
The folks getting credit only ever get a small compensation compared to the value of the innovation. Yet they often took large risks.
A small number of people contribute a lot more to innovation. It is a power law. Most people play it is safe. Only a few outliers try new techniques.
The latter point is important. You talk about fairness, but it cuts the other way. All medical experts knew or should have know about antibiotics by 1940. How many of them were working to deploy them at large? Very, very few. They just stood still while others where doing all of the work.
It is true today. Take any field where innovation is occurring and you will find that the bulk of the people from this field are just busy reaping the immediate rewards of their work, and they do little to push innovations. Very often, they will openly oppose innovations because it threatens the profitable approach they have going right now. Yet when the innovations will have arrived, they or their children will benefit.
It is definitively not the case that innovations are over-rewarded. If it was the case, then everyone would try to be an innovator… but these people are very uncommon.