The Bleeding Edge. Bob Hughes
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the reach of the market: in universities and government research organizations. He concluded that ‘while one may rely upon the ordinary forces of the marketplace to bring about a rapid diffusion of an existing innovation with good profit prospects, one can hardly rely completely upon such forces for the initial generation of such innovations’.
Another big study, published in 2004 by Daniel Cohen and colleagues for the Rodolfo Debenedetti Foundation,32 also found ‘scant’ evidence of any link between competition and innovation,33 although any innovations that were adopted did seem to be diffused more rapidly by competition – the same point that Mowery had made 20 years earlier.
The study also found that the innovations carried out by individual firms tended to consist of adding ‘tweaks’ of their own, preferably patentable ones, designed to secure a positional edge in the market and perhaps monopolize some particular aspect of it. The story of the World Wide Web (now known simply as ‘the Web’) is a classic demonstration of how difficult it then becomes to preserve the innovator’s original vision, and the surprisingly large environmental cost of departing from it – this is described in detail in Chapter 10.
WHY CAPITALISM INHIBITS INNOVATION
The 19th-century artist, writer and socialist William Morris described capitalist competition as ‘a mad bull chasing you over your own garden’34 – a view now supported by a wealth of research. Governments and firms started to take interest in creativity as the pace of technological change accelerated after the Second World War. Creativity became a major area of study, which has consistently found that even mildly competitive environments and situations of unequal power are completely incompatible with creative thinking.35
In one of many experiments described in a popular book about creativity by Guy Claxton, two groups of non-golfers were taught putting.36 Both were instructed in exactly the same way, but one group was told that they’d be inspected at the end of the course by a famous professional. This group’s performance (measured in balls successfully ‘sunk’) was far lower than the other group’s. The small anxiety of knowing a professional would be watching them devastated their ability to learn.
Firms became very keen on using the new research to teach their staff to be more creative, and some psychologists found creative ways to teach creativity, without challenging the creativity-stifling structures of the firms that paid them. Brainstorming, team away-days and the creative enclaves mentioned earlier, are all products of this ‘creativity movement’.
Claxton has an illuminating anecdote about George Prince, co-founder of a popular ‘creativity-enhancing’ system called Synectics. To Prince’s chagrin, his own research led him to realize that the business context made his enterprise hopeless:
Speculation, the process of expressing and exploring tentative ideas in public, made people, especially in the work setting, intensely vulnerable, and that… people came to experience their workplace meetings as unsafe.
People’s willingness to engage in delicate explorations on the edge of their thinking could be easily suppressed by an atmosphere of even minimal competition and judgement. ‘Seemingly acceptable actions such as close questioning of the offerer of an idea, or ignoring the idea … tend to reduce not only his speculation but that of others in the group.’ 37
Even positive motivation stupefies – in particular, financial reward. In 1984 James Moran and his colleagues not only showed that reward impaired performance, they also discovered how it impaired performance: essentially by causing ‘a primitivization of psychological functioning’. The subjects regressed in effect to childhood, and performed below their mental age.38
After the 2007/8 financial crisis, the Nobel economics laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman wrote a global bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, which explained exactly why performance bonuses do not and cannot work – and why the decisions of even the brightest corporate leaders are generally governed more by luck and delusion than by genius.39
Hierarchy invokes a different mindset from the one we enjoy among equals, and in which we are most productive and creative. In his 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Iain McGilchrist has shown how this ties in with the human brain’s well-known (but subtle) ‘lateralization’. The brain’s two halves have somewhat different functions but the most important difference is one of style. In simple terms: ‘The right hemisphere has an affinity for whatever is living, but the left hemisphere has an equal affinity for what is mechanical’.40 The two halves need to work in tandem but the peculiar dynamics of Western society create over-reliance on the left hemisphere, with its more intense, focused approach, resulting in:
a pathological inability to respond flexibly to changing situations. For example, having found an approach that works for one problem, subjects [who have suffered damage to the right side of the brain] seem to get stuck, and will inappropriately apply it to a second problem that requires a different approach – or even, having answered one question right, will give the same answer to the next and the next.41
In his concluding chapter, McGilchrist imagines what the world would look like to a brain consisting of nothing but its left hemisphere, and it looks a lot like the world where so many of us have to live and work: it recognizes skill only in terms of what can be codified, is obsessed with details at the expense of the broader picture, has little empathy. In this not-entirely-hypothetical world:
Fewer people would find themselves doing work involving contact with anything in the real, ‘lived’ world. Technology would flourish, as an expression of the left hemisphere’s desire to manipulate and control the world for its own pleasure, but it would be accompanied by a vast expansion of bureaucracy, systems of abstraction and control. The essential elements of bureaucracy, as described by Peter Berger and his colleagues [in the book The Homeless Mind, 1974], show that they would thrive in a world dominated by the left hemisphere.42
Capitalist industry is aware something is amiss, but cannot contemplate the obvious solution (stop being capitalist) and it is not in the creativity consultant’s interest to point it out either.
CAPITALISM DIDN’T MAKE COMPUTERS…
The notion that computers demonstrate capitalism’s creativity is finally belied by the computer’s history. Capitalism ignored computers for more than a century, and we might still be waiting for them now, had it not been for brief moments of egalitarian collaboration, grudgingly or accidentally tolerated by the elites, during the worst crises of the Second World War. And even then, capitalism had to be laboriously spoon-fed the idea for a further decade and more, before it would invest its own money in it. Mariana Mazzucato’s book The Entrepreneurial State reveals the enormous scale of capitalist industry’s dependence on publicly funded research. One of her case studies is Apple’s iPhone, which would amount to nothing very much without the billions of dollars’ worth of research effort that produced everything from its fundamentals (the microprocessors, computer science itself) to its most modern-looking features: the touch screen, the Global Positioning System (GPS), its voice-activated SIRI ‘digital assistant’, and the internet itself: all the ‘features that make the iPhone a smartphone rather than a stupid phone’.43
Programmable, digital computers in the modern sense (but using mechanical gears rather than electronic valves) had been possible since the 1830s, when the British mathematicians Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace were developing the science behind them. Babbage even developed much of the necessary hardware which, when partially completed (using 1830s tools and methods) in the 1980s, worked perfectly well. By most logical considerations, there was abundant need for Babbage’s machines in Britain’s burgeoning commercial empire – but human labor was dirt cheap and British commerce simply wasn’t interested in them.44
Computer scientist and historian Brian Randell, founder of the IEEE’s