From Creative to Mundane: the culture of innovation

A couple of articles about innovation caught my attention last week. One is about the rate and direction of invention during British industrial revolution in the 18th century*, another is about contemporary Shanzai culture of tech knock-offs in China**.

Both articles highlight the emergence of creative crowd made up of highly skilled craftsmen, which is necessary for accelerated tuning and implementation of breakthrough inventions. A very similar situation exists in Silicon Valley, where aboundance of technical and entrepreneurila talent makes possible the constant flow : from ideas to products. The pattern (see the diagram above) is quite general. It manifested itself in all major innovations, from cotton spinning in 18th century England, to 19th century railroads and telegraph in the US, to iPhone clones in 21st century Shanghai.

One key difference shows up, though. It mostly due to the global nature of today's technology. In England, interaction between original inventors and the creative crowd was local; in Shanghai the interaction is long-distance, i.e. things get invented in Silicon Valley and tuned to local conditions in China. As was the case in all times, technology piracy is rampant. People appropriate ideas of others and build "mashups", moving new essential skills from creative to mundane.

tags: innovation, creativity, pattern, evolution, information, distribution, source

* Meisenzahl, Ralf and Mokyr, Joel. 2011. THE RATE AND DIRECTION OF INVENTION IN THE BRITISH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: INCENTIVES AND INSTITUTIONS. NBER working paper 16993. (via magrinalrevolution.com).
** Tech trend: Shanzai. @ bunniestudios.com (via Max Shtei).