Ungrounded Technology

In my post on Shifting Paradigms and Disruptive Technology, I asked

Why on earth would technologists wish to claim that their favourite innovation is a "disruptive technology", let alone a "paradigm shift"?

I now have a follow-up question. Why on earth would technologists wish to claim that their favourite innovation is "completely new"?

In his Note to Vendors on the Church-Turing Thesis, Steve Jones points out that this claim is generally false.

"No it isn't, it's an evolution of something, it might be a clever idea but it's not going to be a completely and utterly new solution that no-one in the whole world has ever done anything like it before."

Quite so. For my part, when I hear sales people making these claims, I just hope they don't know what they are talking about. If the innovation really were completely new, now that would be scary.

Do you want to fly in a plane whose engine design departs from all old-fashioned ideas about engine design, whose wings are constructed from a completely new and untested material, and whose software architecture doesn't use any recognized patterns? No, I thought not.

If I am presenting a technological innovation to a management audience, for every manager who is excited about the novelty of the innovation, there are at least three who are cautious. How do you know it's going to work? How many organizations are already using this? What is the largest and most complex implementation to date? Do you have any metrics?

Why would you trust an innovation if you couldn't trace the engineering history behind it?

Shifting Paradigms and Disruptive Technology

Why on earth would technologists wish to claim that their favourite innovation is a "disruptive technology", let alone a "paradigm shift"?

Disruptive technologies are like awkward adolescents - rude, unreliable, difficult. As Tim O'Reilly pointed out several years ago

"Disruptive technologies are often not "better" when they start out -- in fact, they are often worse. Case in point: the PC. It wasn't better than the mainframe or minicomputer. It was a toy. Similarly, the WWW was far less capable than proprietary CD-ROM hypertext systems, and far less capable than desktop apps. And developers of both derided it as slow, ungainly, and ineffective. This is a typical response to disruptive technologies." [Lunchtime Keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, May 8, 2002]

More examples from the IT world: relational databases, object orientation, anything by Christopher Alexander.

Paradigm shifts are even worse. In science, the new paradigm is supposed to be incommensurable with the old one. As Paul Feyerabend pointed out, even the basic concepts have to be reinterpreted to fit the new paradigm. So if something is easy to understand and quick to adopt, then it probably isn't a paradigm shift. [For a quick introduction, see Steven Shaviro on Against Method.] Bruno Latour's sociological take on science and technology is probably more relevant than Kuhn/Popper/Feyerabend/Lakatos these days, but even his account doesn't exactly encourage us to overuse these terms.

I guess we aren't supposed to take these terms literally. Randall C. Willis, the Executive Editor of Drug Discovery News, reckons the presence of these two terms is a dead giveaway for unfounded hype. His article Hopped up on Hype (October 2005) presently ranks top in an internet search for "paradigm shift disruptive technology".

Presently coming second, somewhat to my surprise, is the piece that made me put aside my other work to write something here - a blogpost called Event Servers, A Disruptive Technology by one Perren Walker of Oracle, extolling the virtues of Event Servers in general and Oracle's Event Server in particular. I arrived at this piece via Opher Etzion of IBM, who responded with a piece called On Event Processing as a paradigm shift.

Opher make the paradigm shift sounds like an exercise in navigating through some topological space - avoiding barriers and finding new avenues. I certainly agree that this is a good source of metaphors for change management, including technology change management.

But why call it a paradigm shift? What's so cool about paradigm shifts, and why are vendors boasting of the disruptive qualities of their products?

Tractor Pulling

Phyl Speser blogs some reflections on tractor pulling as an example of disruptive technology change. But how much does tractor pulling really tell us about technology change in other contexts?

In a sporting context, technology change is subject to enormous constraints. Most of the technologies that would really disrupt sports (such as remote controlled baseball bats and performance enhancing drugs) are regarded as cheating and therefore disallowed. So what's left? Are we to regard the switch from wooden tennis rackets and skis and racing boats to carbon fibre as disruptive? Or the introduction of electronic line judges and video replays? Or air travel, which allows Russian tennis hopefuls to train in Florida?

In some sports, technical innovations to the equipment have allowed improvements in performance. But modern sports are so highly regulated that the opposite is also possible. For example, the javelin was redesigned (respecified) in 1984 to reduce the distances thrown [source: Wikipedia].

The technology that has disrupted the sporting world the most is surely television, having hugely increased the earning potential of top sportsmen and introduced a significant secondary economy of coaches and commentators and so on. Many sports have been forced to abandon the glorification of "amateur" status.

To understand the role of technology in any system, it matters how you frame the system. There are lots of aspects of technology change that we cannot understand without including economic factors within the system - stuff like "the means of production" and "the relations of production".

The curious thing about tractor pulling as a sport is that it takes the tractor away from its normal economic function. Of course that's true of many other sports as well. The original function of the javelin was catching and killing food. The original function of the marathon was long-distance communication; the technology innovation that separates the modern runner from the ancient Greek messenger Pheidippides is that we no longer need to run 42 kilometres to carry news, we run to raise money for our pet charity. Or something.

Invented Here?

A news story describes a technological problem

• Racing to Gain Edge On Multicore Chips (WSJ March 17 2008)

Two major technology companies and two American universities are researching the problem

• Intel Press Announcement (March 18 2008)
• Microsoft Press Announcement (March 18 2008)
• Savas Parastatidis blog

But it seems the problem has already been solved, according to a couple of bloggers.

• This is precisely the problem that Threading Building Blocks is designed to address (Kevin Farnham)
• The Aleri CEP engine is just such a programming tool (Aleri CEP Blog)
  

Research and development is so fragmented these days, it is certainly possible that a solution already exists in some obscure corner. And large expensive research projects may not be good at producing small and simple solutions. So it is possible that Intel and Microsoft are wasting their research dollars.

But on the other hand, there are too many people - especially in software engineering - who have no real understanding of size. Small and simple solutions don't always scale. So it is just possible that Intel and Microsoft do know what they are doing after all.

Technological Perfecta 2

Following my post on Technological Perfecta on my SOA blog, Tim Bass and Opher Etzion have continued the discussion on Orthogonal Blogging at the SOA Horse Races. Tim writes:

"End users rarely build “SOAs” “EDAs” or CEPs”. End users have IT budgets to solve business problems with the most cost effective technology they can find; and they do not care (if they have a clue) what cute three letter acronyms have been created by analysts to describe momentum in the software market."

Tim's argument here is not about SOA or any other TLA (three letter acronym), but about software innovation in general.

But is anybody asking end-users to build SOAs? To my mind, it is the vendors that are building SOA; they are hoping that their customers will use SOA and related technologies to solve business problems.

But why would anyone want to use new technologies, if the old technologies were adequate? Underlying Tim's post are some fairly fundamental challenges about software innovation.

1. Why should anyone innovate? In particular, why should any individual or organization adopt new software technologies or otherwise change the way they use software to solve business problems?

2. Who should innovate? Should the adoption of new software technologies be visible to developers and end-users, or should it managed by a specialist team of technical architects (either in the organization or in some external supplier) who make sure that everything is transparently efficient and effective for everyone else.

3. When should people innovate? Does it make sense to get in early, or should people emulate the Japanese businessman quoted by Tim: "What we care about are mature technologies with solid reference clients and proven implementations."

4. How should people innovate? Small incremental steps, one technology at a time? Or sweeping changes, adopting an entirely new development paradigm in a single leap? How many simultaneous innovations can an organization cope with, and can (should) this capacity for change be increased?

5. And finally, given that there are so many new technologies to choose from: Which innovations, in which combinations?

To my mind, a strategy for software innovation is not about choosing specific software products, or even classes of software product - it is about managing these five critical questions over time. Specific TLAs will come and go, and software industry analysts will try to create meaningful maps of a complicated and constantly shifting TLA landscape, but there will always be a need for innovation. Won't there?

Guerilla

Nicholas Negroponte obviously thought he could get some cheap publicity for his One Laptop Per Child project by comparing it with terrorism. [BBC News, original video], triggering derision from Fake Steve Jobs and Adam Shostack.

NN: "... up to now we have been more like a terrorist group, threatening to do something and making big claims ..."

FSJ: "Seriously, who does this guy's PR? ... I sort of imagine them all sitting there cringing every time he starts to speak."

Successful technology projects (and for that matter successful terrorist campaigns) often adopt so-called guerrilla tactics, based on low-cost organization and surprise attack. Furthermore, technology champions often see themselves as some kind of revolutionary vanguard or avant-guard - several paces in front of the early adopters. But to confuse these metaphors with terrorism is either carelessly or hopelessly muddled.

Change of Address

I am moving this blog to Blogspot. If it works properly, all existing posts should be copied across. Archive copies will remain here on my personal website, but will not be updated.

The new location of the blog will be technologychangemanagement.blogspot.com.

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Depending on your feed settings, you may receive repeated notification of updated posts when the blog moves. Please bear with me during this move. Normal service will be resumed etc etc.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Stockhausen died last week. I lent my copy of Stimmung to my son's teacher, who played it to the class today.

In 1995, BBC Radio 3 facilitated an exchange between Stockhausen and several young composers. Stockhausen listened to some of music from each composer, and provided some comments and suggestions. In particular, he thought there was too much repetition.

One of the composers, Daniel Pemberton, responded thus: "I know what he means about loops though; that’s because I haven’t got much equipment."

Oh dear, poor Danny. As I pointed out in my earlier post Art and the Enterprise, Stockhausen and his contemporaries didn't exactly have much equipment either. Sometimes innovators have to build their own tools, or forage their own materials, before they can create what they want to create. And sometimes that turns out to be an essential part of the creative process.

Stockhausen is a major figure in twentieth century culture - reviled by those who hate the avant guard on principle, but admired by some of the most popular figures in twentieth century pop music - from Miles Davis to Herbie Hancock, from the Beatles to Pink Floyd, and from Frank Zappa to Sonic Youth.

Ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Sources: Advice to Clever Children (The Wire, November 1995)
Wikipedia: Karlheinz Stockhausen

Classifying Innovation

Masood Mortazavi (Sun Microsystems) quotes a distinction from Thomas Hughes between radical and conservative inventions.

"The system-originating inventions can be labeled radical, the system-improving ones conservative." Thomas P. Hughes (2004), American Genesis: A Century of Inventions and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970

Masood claims Java (originally developed by Sun Microsystems) as a radical invention. But what exactly is the system that Java has created? (Obviously we're not just talking here about software systems written in Java - otherwise every minor programming language would count as a radical invention.) Does it mean something like "ecosystem"? And does one's view of this system depend on one's position - inside the Java world or outside?

Perhaps it's noteworthy that I can talk about a Java "world" at all. Perhaps this means that the Java world itself is "The System" for the purposes of Hughes' definition.

But I think the existence of "Systems" or "Worlds" in this sense is pretty subjective. I'd prefer to interpret Hughes' distinction as a spectrum (some inventions are more/less radical than others) rather than a rigid classification.

But there is another more fundamental problem with Hughes' classification, which is that it appears to confuse invention with innovation. There is often a huge gap (mental as well as temporal) between the invention of a device and the emergence of an innovation. The world of recorded music may be traced back to the invention of the gramophone; the world of telecommunications may be traced back to the invention of the telegraph or telephone; but the emergence of these worlds cannot be attributed solely to the invention of the device. Some of the inventions that powered the industrial revolution (including the steam engine, invented by Hero of Alexandria) were known to the ancients, who regarded them as toys and failed to appreciate their radical potential. The iPod doesn't get a Nobel Prize, despite the protestations of Fake Steve Jobs.

As for Java, I'd prefer to regard it as an innovative synthesis of earlier inventions. Object-oriented languages were invented in the 1960s (I learned Simula at college in the 1970s), but the OO world really only emerged in the late 1980s.

So I think the radical/conservative distinction applies better to innovations than to inventions.

There is of course a further problem - the later innovation distorts our perceptions of the earlier invention. It is now practically impossible to view the ancient steam engine without associating it with what it became nearly two thousand years later. Key inventions are disputed (telephone, television, calculus), and the invention itself becomes a social construction.

Which means the classification of inventions and/or innovations becomes an act of interpretation (hermeneutics). Does labelling something as "radical" tell us anything useful, or is it like ranking Reubens above Ingres?

Clockspeed and Competition

Innovation is supposed to grant competitive advantage, among other things. So we might expect the rate of innovation in a given sector to be linked to the degree of competition. (Setting aside for a moment the difficulties in measuring either of these objectively.)

In my very first post on this blog, Technology and Competition, I referred to the Marxian notion that technology is linked to a falling rate of profit, in which case it would make sense for monopolies to resist new technology. I found some support for this idea in a commentary about the Microsoft anti-trust case from the Economist magazine.

Even the advocates of accelerating technological change acknowledge the relevance of competitive forces. In his post Is the Pace of Business Really Increasing? Dave Bayless makes this point when discussing Charles Fine's notion of Clockspeed.

"The barriers to entry to the commercial aircraft and computer operating systems businesses, for example, slow industry clockspeed dramatically."

There are two contrary ways of viewing this. One is to describe technological change as primarily a technological phenomenon, which can then be influenced by secondary socioeconomic factors (e.g. increased by competition and decreased by monopoly). The other is to describe technological change as a social construction, where socioeconomic forces can make technologically trivial changes seem economically important.

Red Queen Effect 2

Dave Bayless has responded to Critiques of the Red Queen Model, including my comments on this blog (Red Queen Effect, see also Rates of Evolution).

Dave chooses to define innovation as "launching new products". Both John Hagel and I believe that there are other kinds of innovation that are important. But I have a more fundamental concern with Dave'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.

This is why I think we need a rigorous model of technology change, which handles some of the complications I raise in my previous blog entries.

Rates of Evolution

Post reformatted to remove unwanted white space

A fascinating paper by Philip D. Gingerich, shows how the observed rate of evolutionary change (measured in darwins), varies hugely according to the measurement context. (See table at foot of this post). In other words, the observed rate of biological evolution appears to be proportional to the proximity of scientists. Does a similar phenomenon apply to technological evolution?

(Note: I am not assuming that technological evolution is the same as biological evolution - merely that looking at one domain may prompt some interesting and important questions for the other domain.)

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).

But 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.

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Notes

Context	Timescale of Observations	Observed Rate of Change
Laboratory	1.5 - 10 years	60,000 darwins
Colonization studies	70 - 300 years	400 darwins
Post-pleistocene mammels	1,000 - 10,000 years	4 darwins
Fossil record	Millions of years	0.1 darwins

Philip D. Gingerich, Rates of Evolution: Effects of Time and Temporal Scaling. Science 14 October 1983: Vol. 222. no. 4620, pp. 159 - 161

Demise of TV watching?

Some time ago, Michael Goldhaber (author of the attention economy) wrote about the demise of TV watching.

His point - the ability to watch stuff when you feel like it means you may actually watch less.

• Photocopying or filing articles or downloading or bookmarking to read later.
• Taping programmes to record later.

In the early days of home videotaping, television professionals were among the early adopters. They would ask one another "did you see my programme last night?" and the answer was always "not yet, but I've recorded it". A perfect and tactful excuse.

ID Card Roll-Out

The UK Government is appointing a Director of Marketing and Communications to help oversee the roll-out of the UK identity card scheme. [Centre for Media and Democracy, via Fish and Chip Papers]

In other words, technology adoption is seen as a matter for PR (public relations).

It is certainly true that there are elements of marketing in any technology adoption project. But it would be curious if the sociopolitical as well as technological complexities of the proposed ID card scheme were solved by spin.


identity innovation technology adoption

Call Forwarding

cross-posted to Trustblog

According to legend, the automatic telephone exchange was invented by an undertaker (Almon Strowger) who believed his business was being redirected to his competitors by corrupt telephone operators.

David Lazarus reports a vulnerability in call forwarding, whereby a fraudster persuades ATT to redirect a pizza parlour's calls to him. In this case, the fraud involved collecting credit card numbers, but as Lazarus suggests, this scam could also be used by a competitor to steal business.

Further comments on Bruce Schneier's blog, where greygeek points out the historical irony of the Strowger switch.

Fraud erodes the benefits of technological progress. What were the original benefits of the automatic telephone exchange? It was efficient, impersonal and less vulnerable to bribery and corruption. These are some of the benefits of the classic bureaucracy as identified by Max Weber - and many technological innovations provide similar benefits.

And now the benefits of Strowger's innovation are apparently reversed. Don't assume that technology progress is always onward and upward.

School of Rock

Interesting programme School of Rock by British DJ Andy Kershaw on BBC Radio, talking about the role of British universities in fostering new bands in the 1970s. Kershaw himself was a student (and Entertainments Secretary) at Leeds University, then one of the most important rock venues in the UK.

According to Kershaw, the emergence of British rock music in the late 1960s and early 1970s was strengthened by several interlinked factors.

1. Universities provided significant clusters of "early adopters" - students willing to listen to new bands playing new styles.

2. Amateur entertainment secretaries, willing to take risks with new bands.

3. A common source of information about new bands - the DJ John Peel, who tirelessly championed new bands.

4. A rapid feedback loop connecting 1, 2 and 3. John Peel would play a new band, the university entertainment secretaries would then book the band, confidently expecting the students (having heard the band on John Peel's show) to turn up to the concert.

Of course, Kershaw may be exaggerating this effect a little (as a former participant in this process, and as the inheritor of John Peel's role at the BBC). But I'm not too bothered about that right now. What I wanted to talk about is the comparison between the 1970s and the 2000s, and the possible relevance to innovation more generally.

1. Universities are perhaps not such closed social systems as they were in the 1970s. Thanks to the telephone and the internet, students have much greater contact with friends and relatives away from university. Furthermore, students may see university as a place to consume education rather than as an all-embracing social institution, and students have many other loyalties and affiliations. Therefore the university may not be such a dominant clustering force as it used to be.

2. The role of entertainment secretary is not taken by a student elected to the post for a year or two, but by a professional manager who takes a job for many years. Professional events organizers are more risk-averse, and perhaps more predictable.

3. Before his death, John Peel felt he was being pushed out. (Andy Kershaw himself talked about this shortly after Peel's death.) His slot on Radio One got shorter and later, and the audiences got smaller. There was no longer a national community of Peel listeners.

4. And the feedback loops got longer. Concerts were booked long in advance, there was less room for rapid initiative, and the music business regained control.

Some people are hoping that the Internet will play a major enabling role in the emergence of new bands and new styles of music, and challenging the power of the music establishment. Some of the factors that were dominant in the British music scene in the 1970s might now possibly be reappearing in cyberspace.

And what (if anything) does this tell us about pockets of innovation in other domains?

Technorati tags: innovation music rock

Evolution or Revolution

Mache Creeger asks Evolution or Revolution = Where is the High in High-Tech?

"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. I have blogged about this before: Death of Software, Innovation or Refinement.

Bob Wyman complains about Creeger's distinction between evolution and revolution, and insists that Evolution = Revolution. 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).

Ultimately, 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.

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.

The success of evolutionary theory is based in part on painstaking observation and classification by generations of biologists. We simply don't have an equivalent body of knowledge about technological innovation. What we have is large amounts of hype and hot air, and a relatively small number of detailed scientific studies of particular innovations.

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.

Technorati Tags: evolution innovation technology

Bart Simpson Effect

In an earlier post on the Red Queen Effect, I said that the Red Queen has now become an icon for a certain kind of energetic innovation - believing the impossible, accelerating and relentless change.

In his post Bart Simpson and Sun Tzu on Technology Strategy, the Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady identifies another paradoxical innovation strategy, which we could call the Bart Simpson effect.

In Episode 802 (production code 3F23) Bart Simpson has been placed in a remedial class for some reason. He spots a paradox. "Let me get this straight. We're behind the rest of our class and we're going to catch up to them by going slower than they are?"

Some of the greatest minds of all time were considered dull at school. Winston Churchill was not clever enough to do Latin, so he had to spend more time polishing his command of English instead. [Wikipedia: Churchill] And Albert Einstein was considered a slow learner. "He later credited his development of the theory of relativity to this slowness, saying that by pondering space and time later than most children, he was able to apply a more developed intellect." [Wikipedia: Einstein]

Perhaps there are some things you can only get when you do things slowly. Part of the problem with the school system is an obsession with speed. [See my previous piece Systems4Success]. Most parents fondly believe their children to be above average in intelligence, based on fluency, literacy, numeracy, for example an ability to follow the rules of school mathematics and solve average problems slightly faster than the other children. The dreamer who spends all day thinking deeply about a maths problem probably isn't going to get top marks at school. But mathematical genius is about depth rather than speed, wondering what happens when you change the rules.

Stephen points to the folly of trying to catch the competitors on their own terms. "For all of the bubble era or Web 2.0 talk of 'disruptive' technologies, you'd be surprised at just how many vendors we speak with who anticipate closing marketshare or other gaps by simply outexecuting or outperforming their competitors."

If everyone is trying to be bigger and faster, then why not try smaller and slower. If everyone is trying to be smarter, why not try wiser.

And break the rules.

Technorati Tags: innovation

Art and the Enterprise

Artistic Innovation

Sometimes artists produce amazing innovations, with painstaking labour. Subsequent technology makes this painstaking labour unnecessary. We can recognize two separate innovations - the product innovation (what the artist produces) and the process/production innovation (what the technology produces).

What is the linkage between these two innovations? To what extent has the artistic innovation stimulated the technological innovation, established a proof-of-concept which technologists can then implement. Great art changes the way we perceive the world, and this may include changing our understanding of the possible.

One example I have quoted a couple of times is Karlheinz Stockhausen and the synthesizer. In the 1950s, Stockhausen and other composers produced some innovative pieces of electronic music, for which every sound had to be hand-crafted. Once the synthesizer had been invented, similar music could be easily produced with a few quick knob-twiddles. As a result of the widespread use of synthesizers in popular music, as well as the many rock musicians (Beatles, Can, Zappa) who pay explicit tribute to Stockhausen, a piece like Kontakte sounds a lot less strange to the modern ear than it did to the contemporary ear.

On this point I disagree with Brian Eno, who once commented that "Stockhausen was an example of a charismatic theoretician who inspired a lot of people but whose own work is generally unlistenable." [source: MOJO April 1997, interview with Andy Gill]

Does this familiarity diminish the striking originality of Stockhausen's work? Or should we regard Stockhausen's achievement with greater respect, because of his lack of tools, and his (arguable) influence over later technology as well as (acknowledged and unacknowledged) influence over later music-making.

Update: I should also mention the BBC Radiophonic Workshop here. The brilliant Delia Derbyshire produced the original theme music for Doctor Who using hand-made equipment - music that today still sounds utterly wild and futuristic. (Sadly, the BBC no longer uses this version, and now plays a tame remix recorded with modern equipment.)

Similar examples can be found in the visual arts before the invention of photography. Many artists developed styles of painting and perspective which predated the modern camera.

Enterprise Innovation

I think there are three important patterns here that may be relevant for enterprise innovation.

• Innovation before automation. Don't automate something until you have understood it, simplified it, improved it. (This principle is sometimes known by the slogan: Don't pave the cow-paths.)

• Retain the capability for further innovation. Automation should not eliminate the possibility of hands-on creativity. Lewis Mumford (in Technics and Civilization) argues that it is generally beneficial to retain some 'craft' production alongside automated 'factory' production, as a source of 'education, recreation and experiment' and 'as a means to further insight, disovery and invention'.

• Invent in order to innovate. A composer such as Thomas Dolby, who sets out to invent new tools for producing music (including building new hardware and software), may thereby be able to produce music that is different to what everyone else is producing.
  

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For previous discussion of Stockhausen, see my posts on Lightweight Enterprise, and Thomas Dolby's keynote speech at the 2005 Rational Conference.

Technological Progress

For those interested in technological progress, there are some interesting comparisons between the response to the Californian earthquake in 1906 and to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Speaking on BBC radio the other day, Simon Winchester (geologist and author of a recent book on the 1906 earthquake) asserted that the response from Washington was faster and better organized in 1906 than in 2005.

So much for a hundred years of communication technology then!

Of course, Winchester's comparison should not be taken as a simple case of "1906 good, 2005 bad". Some right-wing American commentators (e.g. Donald Luskin) have talked about some of the coordination failures in 1906.

And there are many other differences between 1906 and 2005, including the significant (some might say pernicious) influence of the legal system.

There are clearly some important lessons to be drawn from Hurricane Katrina about the management of complex sociotechnical systems of systems, and I have been talking about some of these on my SOAPbox blog (see especially posts on Efficiency & Regulation 1, 2).

But the technological question still remains, if there is anyone prepared to do the research and tease apart the various threads of explanation. To the extent that the US Government is less capable in any respect than a hundred years ago, what are the reasons for this, and how can this finding be reconciled with an optimistic view of the benefits of technology?

Technorati tags: crisis management earthquake hurricane innovation