The waves of innovation

The innovation files 7

Imagine standing on the beach with a board in your hand, staring at the sea, staring at the sand, zipped into a wetsuit, taking a deep breath and jumping on your board paddling away from the land. Flat on your board, the surf looks like intimidating, furious grinding waves determined to swallow you. But before they devour you, you dive under. After surfacing, the seawater’s salty taste triggers your brain to fire a strong, happy cocktail of endorphin, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. This is life; this is it. After some more duck dives, you end at the lineup where the slow cadence of the sea rules: slowly up and down, again and again. Sitting on your board, staring in the distance, you look for the perfect wave. They travel from far, ready to release their energy as soon as they hit the bank in front of the coast. You spot one, get ready, and go…

Someone, somewhere in summertime
Not only waves but also innovation travels from far. It starts with a soft wind. Someone, somewhere, in summertime, might come up with an idea, an invention, a breakthrough in basic science or maybe just a stupid mistake that triggers a set of events. Like Alexander Fleming, who accidentally discovered penicillin. Many of these winds aren’t strong enough to blow out a candle, like the boiled egg squarer. The what? Yep, didn’t make it. Others caught some momentum but were blown away by others, like the video standard Betamax by VHS. But despite Betamax not making it, it was part of a big wave of consumer electronics that flooded the market in the 1970s. That wave resulted from increasing prosperity initiated by the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War. So if innovation travels in waves from far, can you predict it? Meaning is history deterministic? As you know by now one of my favourite subjects. But to be honest, this time, we didn't accidentally bump into this subject. This blog post is about it.

La longue durée
There is a group of historians that focuses on trends in history. Nowadays, this is not so special, but when they started, it was uncommon to focus on long term developments or, as they called it, “la longue durée”. Yep, they were French and are called the Anales school named after their scholarly journal “Annales d’histoire économique et sociale”. The Annales school…