Taking risks to find new industries
Researchers around the world cry out for more money to carry out their research. Unfortunately there is a limited amount of cash that governments and industry are prepared to spend. Mike Cooke reviews Don Braben's new book, "Pioneering Research - A Risk Worth Taking", that makes the case that some of this money should be put on open-ended projects that could lead to new types of industrial activity.
In the semiconductor industry, one cannot miss the phrase 'disruptive technology'. The term refers to new discoveries that blow what went previously out of the water. Such a disruptor was the silicon chip itself and to a lesser extent the desktop PC. Some see the mobile phone as one of the latest of such technologies. But these are really all based on fundamental research into semiconductor physics in the 1940s. In other words, the basis of this new industry is 50 years old.
What about other disruptive technologies outside of electronics? Although he doesn't use the phrase, it is the contention of Don Braben that the best of what he calls 'new industries' were developed before 1970. In addition to semiconductors, his list includes lasers, jet engines, nuclear power, computers, photocopiers, polymers and plastics, robots and automated production, and genetic manipulation and biotechnology.
"These were not refinements of earlier industry," he says. "They were not predicted. Few of these discoveries were seen as being needed before work on them began."
His list of possible new industries is very short: high-temperature superconductivity, fullerene-based materials, and . . . ? What Braben is looking for is the starting technology for new industries and not refinements of earlier discoveries. But why are 'new industries' important?
Declining rate of GDP growth
By taking ten-year averages of world real GDP growth per capita (Figure 1), Braben detects a change that becomes apparent during the 1970s. The rate for 1951-1974 averages at 2.8% while for 1975-2001 the average is halved at 1.4%. Following the 1987 Economic Nobel Prize winner, Robert Solow, Braben sees technical change as being by far the major source of economic growth. In an aside, Braben comments: "With breathtaking understatement, economists generally came to call it the 'residual', even though at that time it seemed to account for some 90% of growth!"
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Fig.1: Real world GDP/capita rolling ten-year averages. Sources A Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy 1820-1992; OECD, 1995; International Monetary Fund annual reports |
Since technical change is so important, what has changed since the 1970s? According to Braben, it is not that insufficient money is going into scientific and industrial research. Rather that in the name of 'efficiency' it is targeted in directions agreed by consensus and subject to peer review. The thing about new ideas is that they don't agree with what has gone before. They disrupt consensus. It is the dissenters that create new ideas.
Braben is concerned that the spirit of dissent is being stifled in the modern mainstream bureaucratic approach to university and industrial research. He further points out that his examples of potential new industries - high temperature superconductors and fullerenes - were produced in spite and not because of the new funding regimes. High temperature superconductors were produced "behind the fume cupboard" - i.e. not with the full knowledge of IBM that ran the Zurich lab where they were discovered. Sir Harry Kroto had to partially fund his early research into the C60 fullerene out of his own pocket.
Risks worth taking
In the final chapter of the book, Braben describes his own approach to funding groundbreaking research based on his experiences leading the Venture Research Initiative sponsored by the UK oil company BP. This spent about £15 million over ten years on some 26 groups - in other words, not a lot of money. The initiative aimed to fund only those projects that might lead to new types of industrial activity and that wouldn't be supported elsewhere. The initiative came to an end in 1990 when BP shut it down because it wasn't directed to a 'core competency'. Braben has since tried to find support for a new initiative supported by a consortium of companies. Despite coming close, this has yet to materialise.
While there is much in Braben's book with which I would disagree, he does seek to struggle with some of the core problems of creating progress for humanity.
Book details:
Pioneering Research - A Risk Worth Taking, Donald W Braben, John Wiley & Sons (2004), Û33.30.
