Two ends of the innovation chain

Often, innovations do not follow a linear pathway

Perovskite is mineral calcium titanate, discovered in the Ural Mountains in 1839, the same year that Jamsetji Tata was born. As many as 168 years later, perovskite is at the heart of an exciting solar technology. Describing examples through this column, I had earlier averred that the time lag between scientific invention and commercialisation is long. Readers pushed back because (a) innovators don’t straddle the value chain from science to consumption and (b) anyway, timelines are declining with new technologies. For example, a coin-sized chip branded BatEye, has been placed on the bat in the ongoing Champion’s Trophy games; it beams wireless data on the ball angle and bat speed, amplifying enjoyment for the cricket spectator. 

I researched data on the time gap between science and commercialisation. Three scientists from the University of Tokyo, having studied time lags in the solar industry, did not find anything conclusive (2009). In another study (2011), scientists at the Institute of Public Health, Cambridge University, stated, “We concluded that the current state of knowledge of time lags… is of limited use.” However, I feel that there are two noteworthy principles — first, that timelines are indeed different across categories, but their life cycles evolve through a similar pattern and, second, that innovations do not follow a linear pathway.

Life cycle: Technology life cycle (TLC) refers to the time and cost of developing technology (research and development or R&D), and finding ways to recover those costs (manufacturing and marketing). Studies of TLCs indicate that some technologies such as paper, cement and steel have a long lifespan — there are continual variations in technology over a long time — while in others like electronics, the TLC may be quite short. A biology metaphor may help.

Fruit flies and tortoises have a similar-shaped life cycle, but fruit flies live only 15 days while tortoises live 200 years. Around 1900, agricultural scientist Max Kleiber at Davis, California, established that the number of heartbeats tends to remain stable within a species, so the bigger the animal, the slower its heartbeat. Bigger animals take time to use up their quota. (This fact does not make big animals less or more efficient than small animals.)

Without doubt there are difficulties in judging precisely when the science was invented and when commercialisation occurred. In particular, the technology industry thinks in terms of “platform” versus “application” technologies — desktop operating systems like Adobe PostScript, Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac are platform technologies with a long durability. Application innovations derive from exploiting existing scientific knowledge into new market uses, for example, Adobe PDF. 

Apple impresses because of its consumer innovations; its R&D expenditure at 3.5 per cent of revenue is much smaller than, say, Intel, Alphabet and Microsoft. The iPhone innovation included nine “enabler” semiconductor technologies (like central processors, dynamic random access memory, liquid crystal and lithium-ion batteries) and three “enhancing” technologies (like GPS and artificial intelligence with voice interface). The science underlying these technologies goes back several decades, and Apple’s genius lay in integrating these technologies in a distinctive and consumer-relevant manner. Mariana Mazzucato’s book The Entrepreneurial State is quite instructive in elaborating this view.

Innovation pathway: The Technology Strategy Board report of May 2011 from the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills recognised the non-linear pathways of some innovations in its report: “The path from initial idea to market-ready product is uneven, and has many twists and turns.” The linear model of innovation gained credibility after World War II, principally due to recognition of innovative technologies in defence. The atomic bomb had its origins in nuclear and elementary physics, just like radar technology had its origins in the science of microwave radiation. These are extensively described in the Princeton publication, Innovation and Commercialization, published in 1995. 

Iterative technology development, which followed a non-linear path, has been recognised, for example, innovations spurred through new insights into market demand or innovations where application technology precedes the science. An example of innovation through consumer insights is how the video cassette recorder was commercialised. An example of the application preceding science is how the Wright brothers made a flying machine without knowing much about aerodynamics.

The author is a corporate advisor and distinguished professor at IIT Kharagpur; rgopal@themindworks.me