Strategy+Business has been a little, interesting journal for the past few years. One the one hand, it's the external house organ of Booz & Company, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that unless the house organ tends to be ... explicit ... about being a cheerleader when the content should speak for itself. McKinsey makes a good journal too.
This quarter we're treated to an interview with W. Brian Arthur. Mr Arthur spent most of the 80s on the Stanford University / Santa Fe Institute nexus of the world and has now decided to spend all his time in Santa Fe.
It appears the interview was triggered by the publication of Mr. Arthur's latest book, The Nature of Technology and How it Evolves. Here are a couple of pithy extracts that I hope will encourage you to buy the book:
The economy thus isn’t something that contains a few technologies. The economy is its technologies and is an expression of its technologies — in the same way that an ecosystem emerges from its species. And if an economy consists of its technologies, then it automatically changes the moment you change any of the technologies. If a part of the legal system or venture capital financing is altered, changes reverberate throughout the entire economy, and not just in the parts of the economy most directly impacted by what has occurred. Any time a new species comes into the ecosystem, the ecosystem changes.
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But I don’t think human beings are any faster at inventing these days than they were 100 years ago. Maybe more of us are working with technologies — there are more scientists and engineers. Maybe we’re better organized than before. But above all, what has changed is that we have much more to invent with. That creates a certain speed-up in innovation, but I’m not expecting this rate to accelerate to infinity any time.
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But it’s not sufficient to have good scientists or good technical journals or even good universities, any more than it is sufficient to take a recipe book off the shelf to be able to cook Chicken Cordon Bleu. What’s more important is the implicit knowledge of what temperatures to use, and just how much to cook something.
The more advanced the technology, the more craft is required in innovation. Innovation is about shared knowledge: of how to deal with phenomena, of parameter values and what to do when things go wrong — knowing what new pathways to try and what things have already been tried so you don’t have to waste your time on them. And in the computer industry, much of that knowledge resides locally in Silicon Valley.
