with qualities never before seen in a metal: it was light- weight, shiny, resistant to rust, and highly conductive.” Yet, as the author, John Colapinto, continues, it wasn’t until a century later that aluminum found its “killer app”—airplanes. Colapinto goes on to quote Robert Friedel, a historian of technology at the University of Maryland: “The more innovative—the more breaking- the-mold—the innovation is, the less likely we are to figure out what it is really going to be used for.”
Which makes pushing for anything but incremental innovation extremely hard. It also makes breakthrough, disruptive innovation seem to require a good dose of crazy to accomplish. And that’s a problem for DOD or anyone else trying to figure out the next big thing. Graphene has shown up in tennis racquets and ink, ac- cording to the article, but its moment of crazy transfor- mation hasn’t happened. It may never.
Historically, it has often been the case that technolo- gies intended to solve a particular problem have been found to do a very good job solving entirely different problems. Aluminum was discovered a very long time before the first airplane ever made it off the ground. ARPANET “failed” to solve the problem for which it was invented, but it solved a whole lot of problems that no one had ever imagined needed solving.
That’s because, sometimes, enabling technologies depend on other enabling technologies to find their true utility. Many of the technologies we associate with one war were invented in a previous one. Trenches were developed during the Civil War when advances in weapons technology had not been matched by advances in technologies to enhance mobility. That eventual advance in ground mobility, the tank, was developed during World War I, but not as a mobility solution. Tanks were intended to solve the problem of barbed wire on the battlefield. And while they were a smashing success at that, their continued develop- ment—despite much resistance—enabled significant ad- vances in the art of warfare. The jet engine had been around in basic form for centuries before, late in World War II, a practical design for a jet-powered airplane was developed, but too late to have much impact in that war. Technologies that are common on today’s
A GAME-CHANGER IN WAITING?
The idea of graphene, shown here at the molecular level, has been around for many decades, but it wasn't actually produced until the last decade. And despite its seemingly game-changing proper- ties—superb electrical and thermal conductivity, strength 100 times that of steel of similar size, near-transparency—graphene has yet to “change the game” six years after the Nobel Committee recognized its groundbreaking nature. Innovation can require decades or cen- turies of waiting for other technologies to catch up, or for the right problem to present itself. (Image by Martin McCarthy/iStock)
battlefields were developed during and after the Cold War, when they would have seemed crazy.
Because of the situation in which the Pentagon finds itself today, it may be time to “open the aperture” not just to thinking outside the box, but to thinking just a little crazy, which will take a considerable cultural shift. It helps to remember that quote from the technology historian. “The more innovative—the more breaking- the-mold—the innovation is, the less likely we are to figure out what it is really going to be used for.”
It’s entirely possible, even likely, that the enabling technologies for the next big things are right under our noses—already in some drawer, on some shelf, in someone’s garage. It’s just that no one has figured out the crazy part yet. That will happen when someone comes along who knows nothing of what the technol- ogy is “supposed to do” but figures out what it can do or ought to do. Suddenly, there will be a breakthrough.
Then, instead of calling it crazy, we’ll all decide that it was inevitable.
—MR. STEVE STARK
ASC.ARMY.MIL
73
SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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