By MIKE MAGEE
“The technological leaps of the 1900s — microelectronics, antibiotics, chemotherapy, liquid-fueled rockets, Earth-observing satellites, lasers, LED lights, disease-resistant seeds and so forth — derived from science. But these technologies also spent years being improved, tweaked, recombined and modified to make them achieve the scale and impact necessary for innovations.” Jon Gertner, author of “The Idea Factory.”
The Idea Factory is a history of Bell Labs, spanning six decades from 1920 to 1980. Published a decade ago, the author deliberately focused on the story inside the story. As he laid out his intent, Jon Gertner wrote “…when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offered us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born.”
One of the scholars Gertner likes to reference is Clayton Christensen. As a professor at Harvard Business School, he coined the term “disruptive innovation.” The Economist magazine loved him, labeling him in 2020 “the most influential management thinker of his time.”
A process thinker, Christensen deconstructed innovation, exploring “how waves of technological change can follow predictable patterns.” Others have come along and followed in his steps.
- Identify a technologic advance with a potential functional market niche.
- Promote its appeal as a “must have” to users.
- Drop the cost.
- Surreptitiously push aside or disadvantage competitors.
- Manage surprises.
Medical innovations often illustrate all five steps, albeit not necessarily in that order. Consider the X-ray. Its discovery is attributed to Friedrich Rontgen (Roentgen), a mechanical engineering chair of Physics at the University of Wurzburg. It was in a lab at his university that he was exploring the properties of electrically generated cathode rays in 1896.
He created a glass tube with an aluminum window at one end. He attached electrodes to a spark coil inside the vacuum tube and generated an electrostatic charge. On the outside of the window opening he placed a barium painted piece of cardboard to detect what he believed to be “invisible rays.” With the charge, he noted a “faint shimmering” on the cardboard. In the next run, he put a lead sheet behind the window and noted that it had blocked the ray-induced shimmering.
Not knowing what to call the rays, he designated them with an “X” – and thus the term “X-ray.” Two weeks later, he convinced his wife to place her hand in the line of fire, and the cardboard behind. The resultant first X-ray image (of her hand) led her to exclaim dramatically, “I have seen my death.” A week later, the image was published under the title “Ueber eine neue Art von Strahlen” (On A New Kind of Rays).
William II, German Emperor and Prussian King, was so excited, he rushed the physicist and his wife to his castle in Potsdam for a celebrity appearance and lecture on these “invisible rays.” The New York Times was considerably less excited when they reported on January 19, 1896 on the lecture and Roentgen’s “alleged discovery of how to photograph the invisible” labeling the scientist “a purveyor of old news.”
But one week later, on January 26, the paper had a change of heart, writing: “Roentgen’s photographic discovery increasingly monopolizes scientific attention. Already numerous successful applications of it to surgical difficulties are reported from various countries, but perhaps even more striking are the proofs that it will revolutionize methods in many departments of metallurgical industry.”
By February 4, 1896, the paper was all in, conceding that the “Roentgen Ray” and the photo of wife Anna’s hand had “nothing in common with ordinary photographs.” The following day, the Times used the term “X-rays” but never spoke of it again until Roentgen’s death in 1923, when the Times obituary called it “one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science.” And in 1901 Roentgen received the Nobel Prize in Physics. Roentgen never sought a patent on his discovery, feeling to do so would be unethical. He donated the 50,000 Swedish krona prize to the University of Wurzburg.
And now to the other “XX” in the room. When Musk purchased Twitter, and renamed it “X”, he was focused on political domination not technologic innovation. He financially inserted himself into Trump World for a small (to him) investment of $300 million. In this oligarchal cocoon, he has been fast at work dismantling federal agencies, often with his 4-year old son (also named “X”) on his shoulders. His targets are laced with obvious conflict of interest. For example, the NTHSP (National Highway Traffic Safety Program) in the Department of Transportation (slatted for destruction) has been investigating Tesla’s high rate of auto-pilot fatal accidents; and the end of federal subsidies for widespread electric charging stations benefits Musk financially since Tesla already enjoys a prohibitive lead over his competitors.
But can Trump and Musk manage the surprises ahead? As Erik Brynjolfsson PhD (MIT), who currently directs Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab and teaches a seminar titled “The AI Awakening: Implications for the Economy and Society,” likes to preach, innovation that promises increased productivity not infrequently encounters paradoxical blowbacks. These come in many forms. For example, dramatic new chemicals that greatly expand crop yield may also be found to irreparably harm delicate ecosystems that hang by a thread.
Or more relevant to Musk, powerful social media platforms, like “X” number 1, may be undermined by the very explosion of misinformation, hate messaging and foreign propaganda that they enabled. Just ask Kelly Ann Conway’s daughter, Claudia Conway, how her mother’s unleashing of “alternate facts” during Trump’s first term has impacted her family trajectory – big time blowback.
Lawless actions by the executive branch have energized city, state, and federal legal practitioners. And Musk’s appearances, with “X” number 2 purposefully poised on his shoulders in the Oval Office, drew a special Press introduction this week from the President. “This is X, and he’s a great guy — high IQ,” said Trump. All of this has sent Musk approval ratings into the cellar along with Tesla sales in Europe and the U.S. In the latest poll of Republicans, 3/4’s do not want Musk to have “a lot of influence” in the Trump administration. And Tesla has experienced its first ever annual sales decline.
More “surprises” likely lie ahead. As legendary Tech Analyst, Kara Swisher, says the “bromance between Trump, Musk may be doomed by egos: There can only be one.” Denis Cortese MD, former CEO/President of the Mayo Clinic and Director of ASU’s Center for Healthcare Delivery and Policy, sums it up nicely in responding to this piece: “Innovation can be disruptive. Disruption for the sake of disruption is not innovation….but it might require innovation in order to recover.”
Mike Magee MD is a Medical Historian and regular contributor to THCB. He is the author of CODE BLUE: Inside America’s Medical Industrial Complex. (Grove/2020)
Publisher: Source link
