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Introduction
I have always been wary of the common belief that technological change is
accelerating. I think this belief derives from a combination of proximity, selectivity
and distorted perception. I think we can sometimes be disproportionately
impressed by the glamour of recent technology, and misled by the commercially-
driven measures of intellectual property (such as volumes of patent activity and
product releases).
I am also wary of the supposed implications of this belief, in justifying (or
apparently making inevitable) a kind of pathological hyperactivity, as discussed
by Albert Borgmann in Crossing the Postmodern Divide.
Technology change is undoubtedly a major phenomenon of modern life, but it is
more complex and subtle than many commentators acknowledge, and the simple
models are based on illusion. In this paper, I hope to explore some of the issues
with this illusion.
Believing the impossible, accelerating and relentless change - these are now
among the totems of innovation. The Red Queen has now become an icon for a
certain kind of energetic innovation.
The risk management consultant Bob Charette uses the related image of Running
Up the Down Escalator. i In one version of the story, the acceleration control is at
i
The SEI once offered a video with this title presented by Bob Charette. (I haven't seen this
video, but I've seen other materials derived from Charette's work that portray the staircase
the top, so those who are most successful at running up the down escalator get
the chance to speed up the escalator, thus increasing the gap between
themselves and their competitors.ii
Theories of Acceleration
Raymond Kurzweil, Law of Accelerating Returns.
Charles Fine, Clockspeed.
Charles Fine (Clockspeed) argues that the pace of change (which he calls industry
clockspeed) varies quite significantly between different industries. Using Fine's
multi-dimensional approach to measuring clockspeed, it appears that in high
clockspeed industries substantial changes occur every 2 to 4 years, while in slow
clockspeed industries similarly substantial changes occur, on average, every 10 to
20 years.iii
In his book Adaptive Enterprise, Stephan H. Haeckel writes "Because the
information component of products can change faster, it will change faster.
Because information can be rapidly disseminated, it will be rapidly acquired by
others. As a result, product life cycles will continue to shrink, and the pace of
change will continue to accelerate." This statement looks like technological
determinism.
Dave Bayless has propounded a model of accelerating product innovation, which
he has named after the Red Queen.iv He points out that the compound effect of a
10% annual acceleration in product innovation results in a halving of product life
cycle duration every seven years. Bayless acknowledges that an industry's
average product life cycle is but one indicator of clockspeed and is, no doubt,
incomplete. Furthermore, proximity may very well distort our perception of
clockspeed, and, technological evolution may well be punctuated. Nevertheless,
he argues that a decrease in product life cycle is operationally
important–"variations and mutations" may not "be remembered in fifty years
time," but they are still important to individual businesses and their stakeholders.v
Types of innovation
Bayless chooses to define innovation as "launching new products". However, this
is not the only form of innovation that is important. For example, John Hagel
points out that process innovation can be as significant as product innovation.vi
However, it often seems that product innovations get more attention than process
innovations, and there may be an unconscious gender bias here. In his book, The
Myth of the Machine (pp 139-140), Lewis Mumford argues that technology can
bear both masculine and feminine characteristics. "The tool and the utensil, like
the sexes themselves, perform complementary functions. One moves,
manipulates, assaults; the other remains in place, to hold and protect and
preserve." The palaeolithic [i.e hunting/nomadic] inventions were more masculine
than feminine: fire, spears, arrows, etc. "The radical neolithic [i.e. farming]
Granularity of innovation
But I have a more fundamental concern with Bayless’s definition - if I don't know
exactly what counts as a "new product", then I don't know how to count them. If
this year's model has a slightly faster chip than last year's model, or a brushed
aluminium case, does that count as a "new product"? Let's say the iPod is a new
product, but is the iPhone really a new product, or just a fancy redesign of an old
product?
Lots of people in product development have a vested interest in labelling
everything as "new improved". Pharma companies spend a small fortune looking
for variations on existing drugs, so they can get patent protection for the "new"
formula. But if you take these descriptions at face value, you get a fundamentally
distorted view of the underlying technology change.
Innovation Saturation
In 2005, Jonathan Huebner produced some data indicating that rates of global
innovation have been declining in recent decades.ix In a critical review of
Huebner’s paperx, John Smart disagrees with Huebner’s analysis with regard to
technological innovation. Smart argues that technological innovation “as we
might generally define it” appears to be increasingly rapid, autonomous, and
occurring more below the threshold of human perception with each passing year,
while a number of objectively measurable technological capacities (Moore's law,
etc.) continue to grow at exponential or slightly superexponential rates.
However, Smart accepts that there may have been a decline in rates of human-
initiated innovation (as opposed to that initiated by our technologies) and in
subjective or apparent innovation rates, specifically, technological advances that
are easily observable and classifiable by human beings.
Smart identifies two other factors that might be contributing to Huebner's
observation of declining innovation in the human domain. Firstly, an apparent
vii
http://blogs.iona.com/newcomer/archives/000114.html
viii
Paul Brown, at that time CTO of software firm FiveSight. Blog no longer accessible.
ix
"A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation," Jonathan Huebner, Technological
Forecasting & Social Change, 72(8):988-995.
http://accelerating.org/articles/InnovationHuebnerTFSC2005.pdf
x
http://accelerating.org/articles/huebnerinnovation.html
Technology Evolution
Consider these questions:
Did the lightbulb or bicycle change more
• between the years 1880-1900?
• or between the years 1980-2000?
Did the computer change more
• from 1950 to 1970?
• from 1980 to 2000?
It is certainly true that there have been huge numbers of small modifications to
devices such as lightbulbs, bicycles and computers since 1980. There has also
been a proliferation of variations and mutations. But will any of this innovation be
remembered in fifty years time? From a historical perspective, this kind of
detailed technological refinement (or even hyperactivity) may seem rather less
significant than the initial burst of technical creativity when the device was taking
shape in the first place.
Hype curve
Popular models of technology change and technology adoption, including those
used by many software industry analysts, fudge the complexities identified in this
section, and assume that the identity and granularity of innovations is
unproblematic.
One analyst firm (Gartner) maps technologies against a so-called Hype Cycle (it’s
actually a curve whose shape has not altered (or accelerated) in ten years. But if
we are to accept the belief in an accelerating technological environment and the
idea that the half-life of new technologies is getting shorter, this would be
consistent with a shifting (shrinking) curve.
Furthermore, we might expect the quantity of attention received by each
technology to be affected by the number of technologies competing for attention -
and if this is increasing, the quantity and/or duration of hype might be reduced -
in other words the hype curve getting steeper. (Surely technologies used to
remain at the top of the hype curve for longer than they do today?)
However, there are several other reasons why we should not take such curves
seriously as empirical theories of technological change. Firstly, all technologies
appear to have the same eventual outcome. And secondly, all the points are
perfectly on the line. To a scientific mind, this indicates that the coordinates are
not based on any real objective measurement, and that the curve itself is not
subject to scientific investigation or calibration. The curve itself is based on a
standard engineering pattern.
Evolution or Revolution
Mache Creeger asks Evolution or Revolution = Where is the High in High-Tech?xi
"We work in an industry that prides itself on 'changing the world', one that
chants a constant mantra of innovation and where new products could
aptly be described as 'this year’s breakthrough of the century'. While there
are some genuine revolutions in the technology industry, including
cellphones, GPS (global positioning system), quantum computing,
encryption, and global access to content, the vast majority of new product
introductions are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Real technical
breakthroughs are few and far between. Most new products are just a
recycling of an earlier idea."
This represents a challenge to the popular belief in the accelerating rate of
technical change.
Bob Wyman complains about Creeger's distinction between evolution and
revolution, and insists that Evolution = Revolution.xii There are undoubtedly some
complications in evolutionary theory that Creeger doesn't mention. (Wyman
references over a dozen articles in Wikipedia.) But I don't think this alters
Creeger's basic argument about the pace of technological change. Wyman
suggests that the current situation may be interpreted as part of an evolutionary
cycle, and hopes (even predicts) that there is more innovation just around the
corner.
"Today's thinkers are no less smart and no less innovative than were the
folk working 'back in the day'. The difference is that today we're all still
focused on working through the implications of the last revolution. In time
we'll exhaust the realm of easily achieved secondary innovations and we'll
then be ready to move on to more revolutionary 'Cambrian' times again. It
is always like this. It always has been and it always will be."
He appeals vaguely to various intellectual authorities (including Stephen Jay Gould
and the entire Santa Fe Institute) in support of this wishful thinking, before falling
back on some popular but lightweight business literature (Clayton Christensen:
The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution).
How can we measure the true pace of technological change? Some people use
patent activity as a metric, but this metric is made almost meaningless by the
vast number of trivial patents, as both Creeger and Wyman agree. How can we
decide which are the major innovations? Creeger mentions a few, but Wyman has
his doubts even about these.
Even in the absence of detailed empirical data, however, it is always useful to
step back from the current obsession with technical wizardry, and try to get a
bigger picture of technological change. In this spirit, I welcome both Creeger's
polemic and Wyman's reinterpretation, while remaining cautious about the
inevitable subjectivity of both.
Rates of Evolution
We must not assume that technological evolution is the same as biological
evolution. The comparison between biological evolution and technological
evolution may be useful as an explanatory device, or as a source of interesting
hypotheses, but not as a reliable source of predictions about the future. However,
looking at one domain may prompt some interesting and important questions for
the other domain.
xi
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1127873
xii
http://bob.wyman.us/main/2006/05/evolution_revol.html
Asymmetric demand
There are some interesting complications (or asymmetries) in technology change,
and a rigorous model of technology change must clearly articulate the following
three layers.
1. The product is not the technology. A product may be composed from a large
number of components, each of which may be subject to technical innovation.
Product innovation is not a simple linear function of technology innovation; a
product lifecycle can be extremely short, but most of the underlying technology
may be moving much more slowly. Or vice versa.
2. The adoption is not the innovation (as John Hagel points out). Innovation
includes process innovations as well as product innovations. Hagel suggests that
"rapid incremental process innovation combined with aggressive leveraging of
third party resources may in fact hold the key to diminishing, if not overcoming,
the Red Queen effect."
3. The "device" is not the "commodity". Small incremental changes in the product
may result in radical changes in user experience and practice, while radical
substitutions on the technology side may simply be experienced as slight
improvements in service cost and quality. For example, the consumer experience
of innovation in automobiles or electronics or mobile telephones is not based on
the rapid turnover of model numbers and versions, but on major (and relatively
infrequent) step changes in functionality and performance.
Conclusions
(subject to further analysis)
• Perceptions of technology change are distorted by several effects, including
proximity and fashion, as well as the granularity of measurement itself. So we
shouldn’t take the common perception of accelerating technology change at
face value.
• Theories of technology change are selective, focusing on the more glamorous
(and recent) developments and ignoring other developments altogether.
Which invention has had greater influence over our lives – the internet or the
clock?
• Standard measures of innovation activity (such as patents and R&D
expenditure) include large quantities of trivial developments, as well as
developments whose purpose is to maintain the status quo. However, much of
this activity is irrelevant to most people, and cannot fairly be regarded as
evidence of a social phenomenon of accelerating technology.
• So what exactly is the basis of the common belief in accelerating technology?
To the extent that this belief encourages an unhealthy level of hyperactivity in
modern business and society, what counter-measures are possible or
appropriate?
For Dave Bayliss’s model of the Red Queen Effect, see Videoblog: Innovation,
Clockspeed & The Red Queen Effect http://radio-
weblogs.com/0111718/2005/08/31.html#a287 (August 2005). For comment Dave
Bayless has responded to Critiques of the Red Queen Model here
http://swni.typepad.com/dispatches/2007/10/critiques-of-th.html