Anton Howes publishes a newsletter on the Age of Invention (I just signed up to start receiving it). Here’s an older article from the newsletter on innovation:
The Industrial Revolution was caused by an acceleration of innovation. But how was that acceleration caused? Most theories of the acceleration’s causes assume that innovation is in human nature, that it has always been around.
So, they might argue:
- Property rights became better enforced so budding innovators felt more secure to make themselves known.
- Patents appeared so innovators could reveal their secrets and still profit from them.
- Brits were particularly skilled or well-educated so innovators could more easily get their innovations implemented.
- British society started to accord dignity or honour to innovation so innovators felt motivated to have a go.
- Demand increased so innovators had a big enough market to begin selling their innovations.
And so on. All of these arguments assume the same thing — that innovation is a part of human nature, a choice that has always been recognised. Their implicit claim is that, other than in mid-eighteenth century Britain, save for a few short-lived cases, choosing innovation was simply just not worth it.
I disagree.
The more I study the lives of British innovators, the more convinced I am that innovation is not in human nature, but is instead received. People innovate because they are inspired to do so — it is an idea that is transmitted. And when people do not innovate, it is often simply because it never occurs to them to do so. Incentives matter too, of course. But a person needs to at least have the idea of innovation — an improving mentality — before they can choose to innovate, before they can even take the costs and benefits of innovation into account.
An illustration: at a conference I was at last month the attendees wore lanyards with name tags, which listed their names on one side. Over the course of the conference the tags would inevitably flip over, hiding the names. People would, when introducing themselves, periodically check each other’s tags, flipping them the right way around. But only one person — one single person, of attendees in the hundreds, had the ingenuity to write their name on the other side. To my shame, it wasn’t me.
Everyone at that conference had an incentive to do that innovation. Everyone was there to meet one another, so the innovation helped achieve that goal. And the cost of the innovation was negligible. It took a couple of seconds to whip out a pen and scribble a name. It simply did not occur to them to innovate. Innovation can be extraordinarily rare — despite the opportunities, despite the incentives.
