MAKING INNOVATION HAPPEN


A DASH OF CRAZY


Even when organizations encourage innovation, there’s no guarantee they’ll recognize it when they see it. Indeed, much of the history of true innovation is also a history of mistakes, derision and what might have seemed simply crazy at the time.


Consider the ubiquitous internet. By most reliable accounts, its forerunner, ARPANET, was intended as a means for researchers to share time on expensive, large and slow computers, when computers were far from omnipresent. Based on its solution to that problem, according to the Internet History Project at nethistory.info, “it’s reasonable to say that ARPANET failed in its purpose, but in the process it made some significant discoveries that were to result in the creation of the first internet.”


An important thing to remember about the development of the internet is that before the World Wide Web, the technology that underpins it had been kicking around for close to 30 years. Few, if any, saw it as the break- through, enabling technology it would become.


Consider the obverse. Graphene, the only known two-dimensional material, was hailed as a substance that would change the world when the scientists who developed it won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. Graphene was imbued with an aura of limitless pos- sibility. But no one has developed it into commercial or military applications—yet.


Enabling technologies—innovations that are capable of carrying countless other innovations on their backs, and which can lead to great leaps in the states of many arts—can be difficult to recognize as such when they’re developed. A Dec. 22, 2014, article about graphene in The New Yorker noted, “The progress of a technology from the moment of discovery to transfor- mative product is slow and meandering; the consensus among scientists is that it takes decades, even when things go well.”


We humans are creatures of habit. When we have a process that works well enough, we tend to stick with it. DOD is no different. So, when enabling technolo-


gies come along, they can seem far outside of that comfortable norm of how things are done. They can seem so trivial as not to merit interest, or ridiculous, impossible—even crazy. Indeed, much that grows out of internet technology—smartphones, online shopping, self-driving cars, instant messaging and much more— would rightly seem like magic to the casual observer of 50 years ago, even though much of the underlying technology already existed.


People tend to be blind to the inherent possibility of new things until someone does something that, to the orthodox mindset, seems crazy, a waste of time, wor- thy of derision—but eventually inevitable. Consider the example of aluminum cited in that New Yorker article. It was “discovered in minute quantities in a lab in the eighteen-twenties, was hailed as a wonder substance,


FROM MAGIC TO COMMONPLACE We wouldn’t have smartphones without several enabling technolo- gies: the internet, itself the result of a failed attempt to solve a different problem, and cellular technology, the result of NASA’s space program. Truly disruptive technologies come from the least- expected places: from failure, from programs examining other problems (NASA wasn’t trying to make it possible for us to take phone calls on the go)—and from thinkers whose ideas are usually dismissed as crazy. (Image by pixtawan/iStock)


72


Army AL&T Magazine


July-September 2016


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