Innovation Behavior
A relatively recent body of research has been dedicated to exploring innovation, and why—by some metrics at least—the pace of innovation seems to have slowed.
This statement warrants an up-front caveat, as it's anything but clear this is the case, and there are reasons to believe innovation can take different shapes over time, so what seems to be a slowdown in ingenuity may actually represent a surge in inventiveness or evolution in less-appreciated fields, less-tangible industries, or perhaps even in the realm of social welfare, systemic development, and so on.
Said another way: just because we're not inventing a flurry of new whiz-bang gizmos and discovering a vast array of new, paradigm-shifting things each year doesn't mean things aren't changing. It may just mean that what's changing is invisible to most of us, or influencing the world in which we live so subtly we have trouble noticing the changes or measuring the innovation that’s occurring.
That said, a primary thesis of this theory is that prior periods of innovation have left us with so much interesting stuff to wade through, and so much accumulated knowledge to learn, that acquiring the education we require to become innovators takes a lot longer than it used to.
The amount of things humans knew in the 16th century was already impressive, but it was nothing compared to what we know today. And that means kids who are learning the fundamentals have years more school to go through before the basics—in the context of all possible knowledge they might acquire—can be injected into them.
It takes many years beyond that to pass on the basics of a specific sub-field of knowledge or trade to the point where they can wield said knowledge productively.
Thus, it may be many of us either never reach the level of understanding required to achieve breakthroughs in our fields, or we don't live long enough to reach the point where that's even an option.
If it takes 50 years to become a true master of your trade, be that auto-repair or quantum computing, there's a nonzero chance by the time you're in the position to know things that aren't yet known—to think up a new way of repairing a car component or a novel mechanism for creating usable qubits—you're already old enough to have other concerns related to family or health or retirement.
There's possibly just not as much time in which to do innovation-related things because so much of our time is spent picking up what we need to know to be capable of innovating.
It's also possible for the social and economic structures (governments, regulations, reward systems) in which we operate to influence our innovative drive and capacity.
There are many downsides to capitalism as it's practiced in much of the world, today, but there's evidence it may be better, by some measures, at stoking innovation than other systems (which in turn provide their own benefits) in part because it incentivizes knowledge generation, exchange, spillover, and transfer.
It may also be, as seems to have been the case in the late-Soviet Union and other generally oppressive regimes, that some social systems encourage individuals to stay silent about what they know and what they think, lest they end up in a gulag.
History is filled with the stories of scientists, artists, and other thinkers who operated under such regimes, and many either hid what they knew or invented, or fled to nations with more open systems of government where such thinking would be rewarded rather than punished.
This often led to a regional “brain drain” (“human capital flight”) and created a system in which knowledge wasn’t shared, and thus remained siloed and practically useless for the purposes of stoking innovation.
One other sub-theory within this larger theory about slowing innovation is that we may, as a species, have explore and exploit rhythms.
Essentially, when we're comfortable with what we know, when it's all old hat and familiar and we feel we're in a cozy position to experiment, we tend to spark new waves of innovation.
In contrast, when we've had a recent innovation wave, we may find ourselves treading water just not to drown in the abundance of new stuff recent generations innovated for us; it’s an interesting time to be alive, but far from cozy.
In the context of the 21st century, it's been argued we saw such a spark at the beginning of the 20th century, which was the consequence of earlier Industrial Revolution innovations.
These innovations culminated with the invention and deployment of the internal combustion engine, infrastructure for the widespread usage of electricity, and a jumble of discoveries and newfound technologies related to optics and chemistry and manufacturing (which in turn led to new fundamental knowledge in science and medicine, alongside running water, indoor toilets, radio, and other contrivances that in turn evolved into even more advanced technologies and infrastructure that reshaped society from the ground up).
That spark, then, fully exploded mid-20th century around and just after WWII, and the Cold War era was arguably defined more by the exploration and expansion of these earlier innovations—iterations and riffs on them, leading to planes and highways and eventually, microprocessors and space exploration and telecommunication—as opposed to truly radical breakthroughs.
New inventions and discoveries still pop up during these "exploit" periods, then, but they're typically derived from previous eureka moments, rather than being eureka moments, themselves.
Again, this is all very speculative (some posit the opposite) and it could be argued that much of the to-do about humanity falling into a period of lackluster innovation may be related to a lack of awareness about the things that are changing: those doing the measuring may be watching science and technology, and looking past dramatic growth happening in social sciences and art, for instance.
Accurate or not, it's interesting to consider how our perception of innovation, invention, creation, and other such things might be influenced by the period in which we exist, as well as what we’re choosing to measure and the metrics we use when doing said measuring.
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