Some Innovations improve the ways we use resources within an existing technological paradigm; others reveal entirely new ways of using the world around us.
Learning to turn earth and clay into useful materials opened an enormous new paradigm. From it came bricks, pottery, tiles, drainage systems, kilns, sculpture and increasingly sophisticated forms of construction, each allowing us to derive new forms of value from resources that had always been around us. But innovation within any existing paradigm ultimately faces limits. No matter how masterful we became in the use of clay, and no matter how sophisticated the structures, tools or works of art we produced from it, further advances in our use of clay could never give us radio, flight, antibiotics or computation.
Reaching those possibilities required entirely new ways of understanding and using the world around us. At times, this meant learning to make use of things we had not even known existed. For virtually all of human history, much of the electromagnetic spectrum surrounded us without our knowing that it was there, let alone appreciating what it might allow us to do. Once we learned to understand and manipulate it, an entirely new range of possibilities opened up. Voices could travel across continents, music could be broadcast through the air, objects could be located by radar, the human body could be imaged, spacecraft could communicate with Earth, and billions of people could connect wirelessly. New paradigms matter because they open entirely new ways of improving human life, allowing us to create forms of value that may have been unimaginable within the world we already understood.
That distinction is easy to lose sight of when we try to measure innovation. Research and Development (R&D) expenditure – the number of researchers, scholarly papers or patents – may tell us something about the scale of innovative activity, but much less about whether that activity is extending existing possibilities or opening genuinely new ones. It may be tempting to assume that, because paradigm-shifting discoveries can create enormous value, people will naturally seek them out and that greater investment in innovation will make such breakthroughs more likely. History suggests otherwise. Paradigm-shifting ideas have often faced significant obstacles to their development and adoption. As human beings, we naturally seek some degree of certainty and stability in an otherwise uncertain world, while cultures, institutions and broader social structures tend to form around existing paradigms.
These structures shape how people live, what they do and how economic activity is organised. New paradigms can therefore be deeply disruptive, displacing established practices, institutions and interests even when they ultimately create substantial value. It is unsurprising, then, that history provides many examples of such ideas being resisted rather than immediately embraced. The resistance to Copernican heliocentrism, culminating in Galileo Galilei’s condemnation by the Roman Inquisition in the 17th century, is one prominent example. An even more striking, although legendary, illustration comes from 1st-century Rome, where Emperor Tiberius was said to have ordered the execution of an inventor who presented him with flexible, supposedly unbreakable glass, fearing that the invention would undermine the value of precious metals and disrupt the existing economic order.
Beyond this natural resistance to ideas that challenge the prevailing order, there are other, more practical forces that can constrain the emergence of paradigm-shifting innovation. The scale and complexity of modern societies mean that most research is conducted by highly skilled experts within particular fields, whether scholars, engineers or other specialists. These experts naturally respond to the incentives and expectations placed upon them. Yet measures of performance can only be built around outcomes that are already sufficiently understood to be identified and evaluated. They will therefore tend, by construction, to sit within existing paradigms.
Consider, hypothetically, a world operating entirely within the paradigm of producing useful goods from clay. Those who developed stronger bricks, better kilns or more sophisticated pottery would readily be recognised as productive and innovative. Someone devoting years to studying invisible electromagnetic phenomena, with no obvious application or measurable output, could easily be regarded as an unsuccessful and unproductive time-waster. The incentives therefore tend to reward demonstrable progress within what is already understood rather than exploration far beyond the established path.
Finally, departures from established paradigms are, by definition, departures from what is known. They are therefore difficult to evaluate in advance, highly uncertain and often costly to pursue. Most attempts to move meaningfully beyond established ways of doing things will fail. Even when they succeed, those responsible for the initial breakthrough may capture only a small share of the value they create. Johannes Gutenberg, whose movable-type printing press transformed the economics of reproducing and disseminating information, struggled financially while developing his invention and ultimately lost control of much of his printing operation after being unable to repay his debts. Richard Trevithick, a pioneer of high-pressure steam and builder of the first steam locomotive to run successfully on rails, faced technical difficulties, struggled to convince others of the potential of his ideas, and ultimately died in poverty.
We therefore cannot assume that, simply because paradigm-shifting discoveries are essential to value creation and the improvement of human experience, they will naturally arise.
