Llewellyn King: Rigidity can be deadly to wonderful innovation

Magazine cover in 1928, when radio was becoming very big but inventors were already thinking ahout television.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Simple advice to innovators and policymakers: Don’t worry about collateral needs or they will distort your good growth and policy efforts.

If we look back, the development of the automobile had collateral effects beyond the ability of the auto pioneers to conceive. Yet there were those who would have restricted automobile development because they worried about the collateral effects, including that there wouldn’t be enough gasoline, oil would run out, cars were dangerous and fueling stations would explode.

The lesson wasn’t that those were minor concerns, but that they were giant and reasonable concerns that didn’t take into account that there would be as much creativity in solving those problems as there was in creating the primary product in the first place.

If the Wright brothers had worried about how we would keep aircraft from colliding with each other, well, we would have more trains and passenger ships.

The message is that innovation begets innovation. Invent one thing and then invest in something else to support it.

Yet there are reactionary forces at work in the creative arena all the time.

To continue with the automobile example, there are naysayers to the electric car everywhere. Sometimes they are driven by economics, but often they are just worried about great change. I can hardly pass a day without reading alarmist pieces about the disposal of batteries, a possible shortage of lithium from friendly suppliers, or that there won’t be enough charging points.

To all that, I say piffle.

History tells us that these seeming problems will be solved by the same inventiveness that has brought us to this time, when we are seeing a switch from the internal combustion engine -- faithful servant though it has been -- to electricity.

The danger is rigidity.

Rigidity is the seldom-diagnosed inhibitor of good science, good engineering and good policy. Rigidity in policy, or even just in belief, restricts and distorts.

A rigid belief is that nuclear waste is a huge problem. I would submit that it is less of a problem than many other wastes we are leaving to future generations. Rigid concerns and rigidly wrong radiation standards led the electric utilities to turn to coal, and now to wind and solar to move away from coal and its successor, natural gas.

Medicine is beset by rigidities and it always has been, from excessive use of bleeding therapy to surgeons who believed it was ungentlemanly to wash their hands. Those who suffer from less common diseases -- Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, is one -- are hurt by medical profession rigidities. The doctors try to fit disease into what they know and treat patients with known but inappropriate therapies.

Even such great innovators as Henry Ford weren’t without their crippling rigidities. Henry Ford was opposed to 6-cylinder engines and wanted all cars to be black.

Political rigidities are perhaps the most pernicious. I would suggest that the fear of the bogeyman of socialism has prevented America from developing a sensible health-care system — one that is less expensive and has better results. It doesn’t have to be modeled on Britain’s National Health Service, but it could borrow from Germany or The Netherlands, where the health system is universal but provided by private insurance. Ditch the rigidity and start fixing the patient -- in this case, the whole system.

Our educational system is plagued with rigidities. At the lower end, the public schools, children aren’t getting the basics they need to function in our society. At the high end, the universities, there is a new kind of aristocracy where the favored faculty are coddled, shielded and underproductive, while the cost for students is prohibitive.

Our most productive, most gifted graduates are compelled to align their careers with jobs that will pay enough to free them from the debt burden we start them in life with. This might cause a bright student to go into computer science when he or she longed to study astronomy, certainly a less well-paid future.

Rigidities kept women from seeking new roles and responsibilities, and from seeking their own personal and professional identities rather than have them defined by the outside, male-dominated society. Homemaking, yes; corporate management, no.

Rigid doctrine is always at work and is an unseen impediment to future innovation in science, social structure and, above all, in politics Watch for it.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Web site: whchronicle.com

There’s long been pushback against the world-changing innovation of electric cars.

Llewellyn King: Hegemons not great for innovation

Innovation is the hot word in the business press and in academia. Business itself, maybe less so. If business is profitable and secure it would rather grow through acquisition than innovation.

There is a public sense that innovation is on a tear; that new ideas are bursting forth irrepressibly. Possibly not.

At a recent exhibition of early stationary steam engines in Rhode Island, I was struck by the inventiveness and the variety of these machines, but mostly by the diversity of the manufacturers. These were the inventions, the innovations that powered the Industrial Revolution. They were being improved and deployed in ever greater numbers until electricity — that big game-changer, that supernova of invention — came along to disrupt everything again.

Likewise, it is impressive to look at the early days of automobiles. Hundreds, if not thousands, of manufacturers, hoping that they had found the forward route and that route was the one that would survive.

Aviation, the same story.

The impediment to these kinds of diverse inventions and modifying innovations is often just the size of corporations.

The early years of computers were a time of incandescent creativity, followed quickly by innovations. But the inventors succeeded too well and instead of there still being thousands of entrants, the early winners hold hegemony over the industry. They have moved from innovators to rent collectors, from white-hot invention to comfortable, corpulent middle age very fast. Include in this list of those who went from eureka beginnings to cautious management: Microsoft, Google, Amazon and probably Uber.

Commercial success came too quickly and hegemon, as it always does, followed; then sclerosis through size.

It can be seen as a replay of what has happened in other industries, where success has led to growth and invention has given way to preservation.

Those who opposed — and lost — the merger of McDonnell Douglas and Boeing did so because they feared that Boeing, which had upended aviation not once but twice with the 707 and the 747, would lose the heart it once had for such bold and risky innovation. Big organizations are inherently hard of hearing.

Computing also has become a hegemon in its own way. The adventurous money, the best minds and the great universities all are centered on Silicon Valley and what has become celebrity technology.

But other technologies are coming on quietly, most notably additive manufacturing, colloquially known as 3D printing. It is moving very fast and has gone from manufacturing simple things to making very complex nuclear fuel, aviation parts and even human body parts. It could be the next big thing.

But what about the next little thing?

Step forward an imaginative television program running on 200 public broadcasting stations. It is called “Make48” and it is a reality show with a difference. Its CEO Tom Gray says one should think of the annualized, eight-part series as a cross between “Shark Tank” and “How It’s Made,” two very successful commercial cable television shows that cater to the latent creative, entrepreneurial spirit often daunted by the complexity of thinking up a product, making it, financing it and getting it to market.

Make48 seeks to solve those problems, or most of them, by recruiting teams of inventors who, at the Kansas City Art Institute, are supplied with experts to show the creators how to manufacture their creations in 48 hours. The product can be in any material: metal, wood, plastic, rubber — you name it. But it has to be made in front of television cameras in 48 hours. Then three winners get the professional help in marketing the products, getting them on store shelves, TV sales programs and online shopping. The whole suit of needs met.

The program is supported generously by chief sponsor Stanley Black & Decker, and by The Grommet, QVC, Duck Tape and others, who are looking outside for new products. Always the hope that the next Walkman, safety razor or Post-it is waiting to be created and taken to market. Last year’s winners were modest: a kitchen sink stopper or bath plug, a series of color-coded food preparation surfaces to prevent cross-contamination, and a laser-aiming device for men and boys using toilets.

Who knows whether a big winner, like the electric screwdriver, will come forth, but mighty oaks do start as acorns.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.