I am very interested in hearing what Richard has to say about a few things that really concern me. My name is Chris Rhodes, I live in Pittsburgh PA. I am a very creative person, I fabricate concrete countertops, sinks, water-features, sculpture etc. I am also very much into innovation, I have been engineering, prototyping, and testing a new streamlining tool for the decorative concrete industry, which will severely cut cost of labor and material. I agree to an extent that innovation is very important. That being said, certain things about it scare me.

I have recently read the new Popular Science Magazine, which I love by the way, and what I got from it was that I think we will collapse if we keep going in certain directions with innovation. We now have this Global Economy, which is broke, but we have huge ammounts of private and government funds going towards some, I think, bad innovation. For example, Carnegie Mellon just received $28 million from the USDA to fund a robotics project to pick fruit from trees, which will be slower than a human. Why are we not smart enough to work together, that money could pay allot of unemployed people to pick the fruit.

The US is now funding a $21 million project to retrofit an old submersible called Alvin to reach ocean depths of 21,000ft, the Japanese can already reach 23,000ft and are working on 26,000ft. Why are we not smart enough to work together, share technology and knowledge, to SAVE money.

Take an ant for instance, we now know that ants are masters of all trades. There was a study (in popular science) they use to think that individual ants were specialists and responsible for one task, however each ant is capable of doing any specialized task. Humans on the other hand, usually specialize in one trade, or body of work, which makes them specialists in one thing, that is why, for instance I found two business partners to help me run my company, they were specialists in the back end of the business, and I was a specialist in the creative end of the business, it was a good mix while it lasted.

There is also engineering of plants at a non profit company seeking to make super rice, which will allow pores in the plants leaves to close sooner during the process of taking in co2 so the plant can keep more moisture. This means they will not suck up as much co2, that to me seems like a bad idea since we already have a co2 problem.

Why is there not a governing body at the pattent office or the government to think these innovations through, and to seek other individuals in the same fields of work to (a) stop what I think are bad ideas, (b) create global teams to create one thing with the highest global technologies, (c) Be efficient with global money and research to reach global goals that we are now competing for.

Dont get me wrong, I love innovation, but I just think it needs to be tweaked a little.

Please pass to Richard Florida, I would love to have a conversation about this or just hear what he has to say about it.

Thanks for your time
Chris Rhodes

–
Christopher Rhodes
Edgewise
412.670.6231
edgewise.concrete@gmail.com

Both conform to Schumpeter’s general theory. Both were times of accelerated innovation. A number of researchers have done detailed work to test these claims.

Joel Mokyr’s detailed study of the Long Depression finds massive innovation in a range of technology. He argues it ushered in the second industrial revolution. But it also caused even more important innovations in the organization of production and in the infrastructure of cities. These organizational innovations had huge paybacks.

Field has looked in detail at the Great Depression. He dubs it the most technologically progressive decade of the 20th century, even when compared to the 1990s high-tech boom period. It was far more innovative than either the 20s or the great post war boom as well. Like Mokyr he finds organizational innovations, in addition the individual technological innnovations to be key. The development of broad systems of innovations are what really boost productivity in a big way.

Interestingly enough, Field weighs the evidence and suggests it is more Schumpeter and less Katz and Goldin that matter.

There is a fabulous University of Toronto stud which also covers the Depression. Instead of using patents or innovation counts or total factor productivity measures, it uses the Library of Congress catalogue to identify new technology books. It too confirms the Schumpeterian notion about the Depression and supports Field’s notion of the 30s being the most technologically progressive of the century.

Now onto the present: I agree with Mandel. The past 20 years have not been great across any measure. Productivity stalled and wage growth was flat. The rich got way richer, as capital and especially banks and financial institutions increased their draw on wealth so to speak.

I think the crisis will help to reset all of that more or less in the way Schumpeter and Marx before him laid out. The crisis should reroute capital eventually away from finance and bubble and toward productive investments in innnovation and technology. Mandel is right to say the bubble more or less crowded out these investments.

But there is one complicating factor that I’ll get to in a post later this week.

Innovation has become globalized. A huge share of US innovation is being done by non-resident, foreign inventors. Without their contribution, the real US level of innovation would be about half what it is.

Love your thoughts on what that might mean.

One of Schumpeter’s assertions was that periods of creative destruction were unleashed by a convergence between technological advances and innovation in models of business financing. But in their work on innovation and education Goldin and Katz highlight how major periods of technological growth have also been linked to innovations in education and workforce development at all levels. Perhaps a stagnation in the capacity to tap and engage the creative talent of broader segments of the population is at much at work in this interruption as breakdowns in the R&D infrastructure.

Richard, in your work and thinking about assembly lines, would you say that (a) Americans (Henry Ford in particular) invented the assembly line and perfected it for large, durable goods to 1950. Then (b) overseas innovators in Japan, then Korea and now China re-invented the assembly line for mass-producing consumer electronics (and then perhaps applied their knowledge to other consumer durables such as automobiles and non-durables such as clothing).

But, aren’t those two foundations of global economic flows done in the sense that’s not where the next innovations will happen?

So, could you now say we are in the post-consumerist economy in the sense that the innovations are now in how we experience the electronics — software broadly defined (MP3 playing programs, video games, tv content, computer, telephone and internet applications, etc. Americans firms are quite good at producing and distrbuting this content.

But software innovation and production likely doesn’t follow the exact model of 20th century industrial production in that it’s not really an assembly line process nor about patents (from what I understand)?

So the question is back to: how do you measure 21st century innovation? and whether your country or region is underperforming?

A decline in patent applications in the US might be a sign that the economy is shifting into this knowledge, creative “software” era. Maybe it’s not so bad.

Further thought: a lack of growth in incomes for creative workers might be masking a choice to participate more in the experience economy rather than use all one’s time “working.”