Science, Technology and Innovation Culture

Marianne Chouteau, Joelle Forest, Céline Nguyen, Marianne Chouteau, Joelle Forest, Céline Nguyen

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119549659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

We are facing unprecedented challenges today. For many of us, innovation would be our last hope. But how can it be done? Is it enough to bet on the scientific culture? How can technical culture contribute to innovation? How is technical culture situated with regards to what we name collectively the culture of innovation? It is these questions that this book intends to address.

1
A Brief History of European Technical Culture and Its Relationship with Innovation

1.1. Introduction

What the two historical approaches to innovation and technology have in common are that they both reveal a difference in their emergence and evolution, both factually and conceptually. To invent is a constant in human history. “The innovator is a leader who does not have to act (prattein), he governs (archein) those who are capable of executing”, wrote Plato in Le Politique [ARE 94]. On the other hand, objectifying innovation and building a dedicated culture around it is more difficult than the act of innovating. It is the same for technical fact. Technical fact, tangible and/or intangible, has been a part of the history of human societies since the dawn of time. Nevertheless, human societies do not necessarily objectify the technical fact, even nowadays. Human societies often appropriate the technical fact without developing a technical culture. Actually, the history of the regimes of technical fact appropriation shows the late emergence of a distancing from the techniques [GAR 15].

Let us take Europe as an example. Its material and cultural history experienced profound ruptures between the 16th and 18th Centuries: the first world expansion in the 16th Century, the advent of modern science in the 17th Century and the compelling development of industrial capitalism in the 18th Century. We would expect that such changes would have been made in an innovative mind and that they would have been accompanied by a culture that glorified innovation. This is what happened, but only partially. The Theaters of Machines, written by engineers and published between the 16th and 18th Centuries, praised the novelty and put it forward [VER 03]. The many technical treatises published in the 17th Century insist on their innovative character. In the 18th Century, encyclopedists pleaded for the expansion of knowledge maps. Yet innovation was unanimously condemned. Even worse it was feared, until the 18th Century. From the 16th Century onwards, there was a growing awareness of technical thinking; technicality became objectified as a singular way of mastering action and its languages. The result is a technical culture, but no innovation culture.

1.2. Technological development practices in the 16th Century

In the 16th Century, Europe initiated a new culture of technical writing. Its function was to set the rules and to define the specificities. The key word: in artem redigere, which I will translate as “confer a written language” on practices and action in general, with what this implies in terms of norms and methods [DUB 08]. This movement of thought was part of the grammaticalization movement, which then seized intellectual Europe [AUR 94]. The general idea of this intellectual revolution, in which we remain today, and perhaps more than ever, is that understanding the world depends on understanding the languages that grasp it. This requires objectifying them by elaborating a language science (i.e. according to them, in their minds, a written knowledge). Practice, a term which did not designate the craftsmen’s know-how at the time, but the action necessary for life in society [CIF 01], was thought of as a language, a rhetoric, which was necessary to “reduce to art”, as Cicero recommended. The scholars set themselves the task of detecting the grammars of practical languages, to define their words, expressions, explain them and compare them. A natural extension of this need was to define a specific method for writing these technical writings as well as possible.

The advent of this new type of technical culture is linked to the development of printing. More precisely, it is linked to the hope that this new technique promoted among intellectuals. Leo Marx explains the disappearance of the technological optimism that permeated American culture from the 19th Century to the 1970s, through the succession of technological disasters, such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island [MAR 94]. A strictly opposite movement occurred in 16th-Century Europe. A deep sense of loss had permeated Western culture since the late 14th Century, after the devastation caused by the Black Death, which translated into a sense of loss of knowledge in intellectual circles. The printing press seemed like a way to prevent this loss in the future. Unlike manuscripts, printing had the unprecedented characteristic of ensuring an identical transmission of writings, and a transmission which, at the time, seemed to be able to be inscribed in the very long term, simply because everything written seemed infinitely reproducible, as long as the initial supports, wooden plates, or a little later, copper, were maintained.

Reducing to art became the major concern of the experts employed, because of their profession, as teachers and/or trainers of princes and elites: lawyers, administrators, architects, engineers, and also fencing masters, dancing masters, with, in all cases, the concern to create, each in his or her field, a technè in the sense understood by Plato. A technical culture that could be shared between practitioners and their clients, materialized at the same time via the quality of the writing of the works, their clarity, their logic, their concern to be complete, and from the results, government treaties, historical methods, social norms, private and public buildings, garden planning understandable and appreciable by all [BRI 02, COU 96, GAR 03, MAN 02, PAU 12]. Famous for the aesthetics of their engravings, and far more technically relevant than was long believed, The Theaters of Machines also contributed to the development of a technical culture shared between technicians and users [THE 16]. Written by engineers and architects, its purpose was to show drawings of various technical achievements including military, garden, household, industrial and energy equipment, in place or as prototypes, and to propose them as a model to sponsors, or simply to amateurs and potential customers, or even engineers of future generations.

1.3. A new system of technology, but no innovation culture

Francis Bacon theorized the need for any society immersed in economic competition to have a technical and scientific culture, overflowing with the knowledge of trades. The House of Solomon, an institution described in Bacon’s book New Atlantis, was to be the place of life and research for the scholars stipulated by the power [RUE 16]. This proved to be a source of inspiration, not to mention a model of action. For example, the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, officially recognized in London in 1662 by Charles II [BRI 96], and the Royal Academy of Sciences, officially founded by Colbert in 1666 [MAZ 02, DEL 17] were strongly inspired by it. Yet no innovation culture can be found in Bacon, nor among the scientists and leaders who were inspired by his ideas [GOD 15]. The culture they all advocate is a culture of invention and experimentation.

Francis Bacon expressed his feelings on the fact, a sign in passing that the question had arisen. Common sense today considers innovation as a successful invention, the invention being a novelty in itself, while innovation is that same novelty socialized, (i.e. economically integrated). In the 16th Century, Bacon, like all the scholars of his time, perfectly mastered Latin, the language of sharing and exchanging of ideas among European scholars. For him, invention, from Latin inventio, is literally, what we find, and inventus, what we discover, that exists without having been detected, or understood, or located. Innovation, from Latin innovare, presupposes introducing something new or making a change. With invention, we are in the realm of improvement, perfecting and progress:

If the usefulness of a single particular invention has so struck men that they have judged superior to humanity those who have been able by a blessing to attach themselves to the whole human race, how much more noble it will seem to invent that by which all other things can be easily invented! [BAC 86]

He becomes excited with the notion of innovation in the Novum Organum. With innovation, we are in the realm of radical change, of societal risk. The philosopher pleaded for invention, which works ad meliorem, for the best, which he recommends himself:

If in this I sometimes departed from what is commonly received, it was with the intention of proceeding in melius (for the better) and not in aliud (for what is other), in a spirit that tends to improvement and development not change and transformation… [BAC 91].

He reiterates this in his essay on innovation: “It were good, therefore, that men in their innovations would follow the example of time itself; which indeed innovateth greatly, but quietly, by degrees scarce to be perceived” [BAC 11]. He perceives innovation rather positively when it comes to method, but otherwise negatively because of its brutal character, especially when it concerns politics.

The case until the end of the 18th Century was that, while the idea was spreading among the social elites that it was necessary to seize professional and trade cultures and transform them into open, shareable and perfectible technical cultures, nowhere was there the idea that innovation should be developed. For Diderot, invention was indispensable because it broadened the map of knowledge; it opened up new paths for action. He also condemned the “disastrous secrets” of the trades and their “routine”. This was the outcome of the habit of keeping complete ownership of know-how, hiding it and delivering its knowledge only to a limited number of apprentices along with it the knowledge of possible new developments.

The philosopher profusely pleaded for the expansion of knowledge, the making available of as much knowledge as possible to the public. This idea, which is the basis of the encyclopedia, was also the main idea of patent legislation during the revolutionary period. There was skillful management of what might a priori be opposed, namely intellectual property and the making available of knowledge. The inventor had his reputation guaranteed and the rights to his invention protected, at least for a certain time, provided he published it and thus made it available. Innovation, as Bacon wrote in the 17th Century, remained something to be feared, because it inevitably led to the rearrangement of structures. As well when one evoked it, one placed it in the nowhere, in an imaginary place certainly describable but without a hold on reality. From this perspective, invention gives way to technical culture, while innovation gives way to utopia [GAR 05].

1.4. But how did entrepreneurs achieve success before Schumpeter?

We cannot reduce the economic structure before the iron/coal/steam system to proto-industrialization. This type of business model, dominated by commercial capital which subcontracted craftsmen and peasant craftsmen, making them bear the investment in fixed capital and the acquisition of raw materials – a business model that the economy is rediscovering today with “uberization” – mainly characterized the textile sector. The European metallurgical industry was based on other models; either land valuation by the owners, incorporation of shareholder companies, private-public blocks, small shareholder companies or state foundries.

In the 18th Century, France saw powerful mining and metallurgical companies in Alsace, Lorraine, the Cévennes, Lyon, the Pyrenees, the Alps and the Armorican Massif. These companies were large, industrial entities in a world that was not. Managed by engineers, financed by shareholders; their initial investment included a major share of fixed capital. There was, in fact, no difference in their way of innovating and investin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1 A Brief History of European Technical Culture and Its Relationship with Innovation
• 2 When Innovation Culture Hides Technical Culture
• 3 Technical Culture and the Contemporary World
• 4 Industrialist and Inventor: Alfred Nobel’s Dynamite Invention
• 5 Thinking Creatively to Innovate: A Study of the Genesis of a Mathematical Breakthrough by Cédric Villani
• 6 Innovation Culture in Organizations
• 7 Technical Culture and Innovation Culture: Reconciling through Design
• 8 Cultural Anthropology, Animism, and Industrial Innovation Processes: The Case of the “Animal Language” Myth
• Conclusion
• List of Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement