On Feb 13, 2010, at 8:21 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote: > In a recent washingtonpost.com article named > "Erasing our innovation deficit" ( http://bit.ly/cG6vGW ) > Eric Schmidt said > > "We have been world leaders in [technological] innovation for generations. It > has driven our economy, employment growth and our rising prosperity. > [..] We can no longer rely on the top-down approach of the 20th century, when > big investments in the military and NASA spun off to the wider economy." > > Do you agree? What kind of approach does the > USA need to return to old strength? > > -J.
I'm surprised that none of the current/former SFIers on the list have mentioned Brian Arthur's recent pitch for "combinatorial evolution" as the engine of innovation. As I read it, Brian's argument is that innovation is an epiphenomenon arising from: -- the functional modularization of many different kinds of technologies*, plus -- the standardization of "open" interfaces enabling those functional components or modules to be combined in different ways, plus -- an environment that enables and incentivizes widespread experimental combination of different technologies, e.g., by occasionally rewarding those who come up with novel, useful combinations. *These could be of the "hard" or "soft" variety, e.g., chip design or double-entry bookkeeping. So, on this account it would seem that both "top-down" as well as "bottom-up" initiative is indispensable. Bottom-up activities are the proximate cause and primary engine driving innovation. However, the size of that engine (e.g., the share of the total population capable of participating constrictively in the combinatorial search) depends substantially on the existence, scope, and openness/interoperability of those modules and the standardized interfaces between them. Unfortunately, by their very definition "standards" are a top-down phenomenon -- both because they are never adopted with unanimous consent (but must be appx. universally binding with a domain in order to work in that domain), and because they must remain relatively stable over time, which means that for everyone that comes along after the moment of standardization, they may feel like an "unjust," arbitrary imposition. In 2002, a quartet of prominent Internet standards developers published a paper called "Tussle in Cyberspace" (link below), which made a broadly similar argument about how the Internet has evolved. However, while mechanisms that the Tussle authors describe are broadly similar, the tone seems quite different, to me at least. The earlier paper seemed to be (obliquely) engaging a topical issues that was just emerging around that time -- i.e., the aspirations of some dominant Internet service providers to subtly alter and/or partially vacate some of the standards that make the Internet "open" and thus had fostered the Internet's rapid growth up to that time (note: today the issue is most commonly called "net neutrality"). In that context, the Tussle paper seems to lean ever so slightly past the domain of observation and Darwinian theory construction, in the general direction of advocating the tussle process and the embrace of whatever outcomes it yields, ala "social darwinism." In any case, I think that any present US deficit in innovation can probably be chalked up, at least in part, to the ongoing progressive deviation from our most recent moment of optimal balance between those "top down" and "bottom up" forces. Some of the biggest recent winners in the innovation game -- i.e., those who benefited most from the latest round of technical standardization -- have started exert their own top-down authority in ways that advance their own private interests, but which collaterally degrade the environment for future/distributed innovation... (The question resonates for me because of the looming inflection point in Internet protocol standards associated with the depletion of the IPv4 address pool, which happens to be the stuff of my day job) My own 0.02, +/- Tom Vest "Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow’s Internet" http://groups.csail.mit.edu/ana/Publications/PubPDFs/Tussle2002.pdf ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
