Page 118 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

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Source: New Knowledge 111

This has not changed much throughout recorded history. It is
widely believed that scientific discoveries turn much faster in our day
than ever before into technology, products, and processes. But this is
largely illusion. Around 1250 the Englishman Roger Bacon, a
Franciscan monk, showed that refraction defects of the eye could be
corrected with eyeglasses. This was incompatible with what every-
body then knew: the “infallible” authority of the Middle Ages Galen,
the great medical scientist, had “proven conclusively” that it could
not be done. Roger Bacon lived and worked on the extreme edges of
the civilized world, in the wilds of northern Yorkshire. Yet a mural,
painted thirty years later in the Palace of the Popes in Avignon (where
it can still be seen), shows elderly cardinals wearing reading glasses;
and ten years later, miniatures show elderly courtiers in the Sultan’s
Palace in Cairo also in glasses. The mill race, which was the first true
“automation,” was developed to grind grain by the Benedictine
monks in northern Europe around the year 1000; within thirty years
it had spread all over Europe. Gutenberg’s invention of movable type
and the woodcut both followed within thirty years of the West’s learn-
ing of Chinese printing.
The lead time for knowledge to become knowledge-based innova-
tion seems to be inherent in the nature of knowledge. We do not know
why. But perhaps it is not pure coincidence that the same lead time
applies to new scientific theory. Thomas Kuhn, in his path-breaking
book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), showed that it
takes about thirty years before a new scientific theory becomes a new
paradigm—a new statement that scientists pay attention to and use in
their own work.

CONVERGENCES

The second characteristic of knowledge-based innovations—and a
truly unique one—is that they are almost never based on one factor
but on the convergence of several different kinds of knowledge, not
all of them scientific or technological.
Few knowledge-based innovations in this century have benefited
humanity more than the hybridization of seeds and livestock. It enables
the earth to feed a much larger population than anyone would have
thought possible fifty years ago. The first successful new seed was hybrid
corn. It was produced after twenty years of hard work by Henry C.