The Innovation Time Bomb — A Warning

(If you are dead tired of preambles that remind you that there’s been a crisis and all that, and want to get to the point quicker, skip the first two paragraphs.)

I write this as the crisis of 2020 (no additional explanation needed) is both calming down and speeding up. Depending on where in the world you live, the crisis is either getting more acute and overwhelming the healthcare system, or seems to be almost petering out. I have lived the era of the crisis in Denmark, where life has been very close to normal for a while now. Gyms and pools have been open for a while, and although there are still some reminders of social distancing around, life goes on much like before the crisis — if with much more emphasis on the cleaning of hands. If you live where I do, you might even think that the crisis is over, and we’re now dealing with the aftermath. What I am worried about, which is also the reason I’m writing this, is that this aftermath may be more complex, and more far-reaching, than the current debate suggests.

Everyone can see the “For Let”-signs, and read about mass lay-offs, so we know that the economy will take some time to build back up. That’s OK, we think, for we’ve weathered recessions before. Sure, there will be hardship, but being the eternal optimists humans are, some are already sniffing at the boom that follows recessions. It might take a few years, they think for themselves, but it will come just like sunshine follows rain. They might even be right. Regardless, we know that the economy has taken a hit, and only time will tell the depth and reach of the recession.

Let us assume that the facts above are either obvious or unknowable. Yes, the crisis is real, and there will be economic effects. What I am interested in here, however, is a special kind of effect, one that I think has been hidden by more immediate concerns. I have for some time spoken about an innovation crisis, but what I am seeing being created right now is something more akin to an innovation time bomb, one which might not have any greater impact in the months or even a few years to come, but which might well detonate with furious force in something like a decade or two from now. This is a time-span that we humans have difficulties with, for it is too long into the future for us to be able to think with any urgency about, yet it is also so short that our actions in the now may very well come back to hurt us whilst we’re still around and working… Just like ecological issues, that are easy to overlook simply because their impact may be massive but also quite slow, such innovation time bombs will be ignored by most people because they simply do not have great effects in the 6–12-month range that for most people is the longest planning horizon one has.

What I refer to with the admittedly dramatic term innovation time bomb is the risk that choices made in the present may turn out to be highly damaging in the long run — even if their impact might seem a net positive right now. This, as a matter that is often overlooked in discussions about innovation is the sheer slowness of the same. You might consider this an odd claim, as much of our discourse regarding innovation emphasizes speed. We talk of “innovation at the speed of light”, disruptions that seem to emerge in an instant, and about a relentless drive to be ever quicker. Such talk is however quite far from the actual reality of innovation. Sure, a few B2C apps may have been created at a hackathon pace, but most real innovation can take years if not decades to come into being.

Be it antibiotics or the internet, many truly massive innovations had a long, slow process of becoming. There was the basic research to conduct, and as anyone who has any experience in this field will tell you, this is not something you can hurry all that much. Even when the breakthrough is reached, this doesn’t mean that the innovation is market ready. Take penicillin, for instance. The flash of insight was one thing. One didn’t call it this back in the day, but Alexander Fleming’s realization in 1928 was something more akin to “proof of concept” than a finished innovation. To produce antibiotics at the scale needed for broad deployment and used would prove to be a problem that vexed some of the finest minds in the field for over a decade — as late as 1942 the total yearly US output of penicillin was only enough to treat ten (10!) patients. It wasn’t until 1944, sixteen years after discovery, that it became possible to produce industrial amounts of antibiotics. This is more common than people often realize. A thousand innovations (including the internet) have had gestation periods and development times that can be measured in decades.

If we take the full arc of innovation in consideration — how ideas are born, tested, rethought, prototyped, abandoned, picked up again, researched, experimented with, taken down the wrong path, developed anew, turned into an early version, laughed at, developed in versions two all the way to 42, made ready for production, taken to market, and slowly adopted — innovation can be frustratingly slow. This is not a criticism, for many worthwhile things take time to develop: mastery, relationships, children. What this also means, however, is that an external shock to the broader innovation system can cause issues that are not easily seen in the here and now.

Right now, we are at a situation where one such external shock has created at least two major effects, effects I here wish to refer to as innovation starvation and innovation skew. The pandemic has created an economic shock to most companies and every single country. Many of said countries have tried to stimulate the economy with packages of various sizes and types, and such stimulance has most likely been necessary. What hasn’t been fully addressed yet is how all this will be paid, particularly when it is more than likely that tax takings will drop precipitously for many governments. Similarly, corporations have of course attempted to do the best of a tricky situation, and some are even exploring investments. In both cases, however, it is starting to seem that cuts in R&D have either already been done, or will be done over the coming period.

“Wait a minute!”, I hear someone saying, “Hasn’t a lot of countries stated that they are pouring a lot of money into ‘pandemic research’?”. Yes they have, and it is part of the problem. When I refer to innovation starvation, I am referring to the tendency I am now seeing to cut R&D budgets, particularly when it comes to early stage research (this is a field where corporate investment has been declining for decades). What investments are made right now are affected by innovation skew, namely that innovation resources are now being put into e.g. virus research in something akin to a panic. Now, I am not saying that we shouldn’t research pandemics and the current virus, for obviously we should. Still, if this focus on a very current problem takes resources away from other early-stage research, we are in effect skewing our coming innovation trajectory. This might be a good thing, if there are many more pandemics about to hit us, but it still affecting the shape of innovation to come.

Taken together, these tendencies have the potential to damage future innovation capacity in a very worrying way. If — and I am caricaturing a little here — the amount we invest into R&D is cut by both companies and governments, and the amount that is invested is overwhelmingly directed to one specific area, this is tantamount to strangling off a number of potential innovation pathways. Now, the effects of this will not be felt right now, or necessarily next year. In fact, what this creates is dangerous specifically because of how invisible the damage done would be. It might not even show itself until in 2030, when we suddenly start noticing that technological development is petering out, at least in fields not directly connected to epidemology.

Now, this of course would not be a complete, juddering halt of innovation, nor would it usher in an innovation dark age. It would rather appear as a slowing down, a lack of things in the pipeline, having to invest twice as much for half the results. It would be a slow crisis, but because innovation often drives economies, it could be a crisis that feeds itself.

So what does this mean, right now? It means we need to pay attention to innovation investments, and have an open discussion about how we can fund the necessary R&D to ensure innovation potential in the decades to come. It also means that we need to talk about how a laser-like focus on pandemics can overreach, and that we also need to support things that do not necessarily answer to today’s problem but tomorrow’s. For even if we were to invent a magic bullet to pandemics, there remain many other fields that desperately require R&D — ecology and inequality to mention just two. If we set off an innovation time bomb in the now, the solutions we need to address such wicked problems may be much harder to come by when we really need them.

To summarize: Innovation takes time, a long time. It also takes resources. If we starve and skew, we may be building a slow innovation time bomb, one which doesn’t explode but creates a lack when we can ill afford one. What we do in innovation policy today affects us and our children more ten and twenty years from now than we might realize. Short term thinking, even in a crisis, is no friend of innovation. Not today, and definitively not tomorrow.

After writing the text above, I came across the following article from Vox — Many technologies needed to solve the climate crisis are nowhere near ready — which neatly shows a clear challenge ahead. Sobering, but important reading.