Innovation, by its very nature, is difficult to institutionalize. Innovation requires free and open environments where people can be creative, explore their own interests, and leverage available resources. Institutions rely on predictable processes so that when someone flips a switch or makes a phone call, they get the expected results.
To be sure, technological discovery and innovation are not necessarily the same thing. From a historical perspective, Edison’s greatest innovation was not the light bulb or the phonograph, but a system of invention. Edison was one of the first inventors to realize the great creative potential of collaborative, applied research. His fusion of the lab-workshop environment led to what we now know as the industrial laboratory.
But as Edison’s innovation became subsumed by the military-industrial complex, true innovation fell to the wayside. The industrial lab became a place where existing technologies were refined and improved upon, but real innovation continued to happen on the margins, by small communities of people enthusiastic about a particular idea or innovation. The pioneers of the Internet developed it in the course of their “real” jobs, eager to find ways to get their desktop computers to talk to each other.
The same can be said about GNU/Linux, or its progeny Ubuntu, which was built by a core team of professionals and an invisible army of enthusiasts and hobbyists working on different coding projects during their free time.
Likewise, the true revolutions in energy supply, food production, and green building are happening on the margins. As connectivity increases the possibilities of collaboration, institutions are increasingly proving too cumbersome and bulky to adapt quickly enough; too boxed in by bureaucratic procedure to make the connections and move the ball further along the green tracks.
It’s true, some institutions have started to jump on the innovation band wagon. Google is a prime example, followed by the less likely but equally compelling example of Texas Instruments. But the fact remains, small is beautiful. The smaller the institution, the more agile and resource efficient. But the question remains, can a swarm-like mass of smaller entities act quickly enough to make the drastic changes that are needed to mitigate the effects of global warming?
