Page 121 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

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114 THE PRACTICE OF INNOVATION

York; Adolph Ochs, who took over a moribund New York Times and
made it into America’s leading paper; and William Randolph Hearst,
who invented the modern newspaper chain.
The invention of plastics, beginning with Nylon, also rested on the
convergence of a number of different new knowledges each emerging
around 1910. Organic chemistry, pioneered by the Germans and per-
fected by Leo Baekeland, a Belgian working in New York, was one;
X-Ray diffraction and with it an understanding of the structure of
crystals was another; and high-vacuum technology. The final factor
was the pressure of World War I shortages, which made the German
government willing to invest heavily in polymerization research to
obtain a substitute for rubber. It took a further twenty years, though,
before Nylon was ready for the market.

Until all the needed knowledges can be provided, knowledge-
based innovation is premature and will fail. In most cases, the innova-
tion occurs only when these various factors are already known, already
available, already in use someplace. This was the case with the
Universal Bank of 1865–75. It was the case with the computer after
World War II. Sometimes the innovator can identify the missing pieces
and then work at producing them. Joseph Pulitzer, Adolph Ochs, and
William Randolph Hearst largely created modern advertising. This
then created what we today call media, that is, the merger of informa-
tion and advertising in “mass communications.” The Wright Brothers
identified the pieces of knowledge that were missing—mostly mathe-
matics—and then themselves developed them by building a wind tun-
nel and actually testing mathematical theories. But until all the knowl-
edges needed for a given knowledge-based innovation have come
together, the innovation will not take off. It will remain stillborn.
Samuel Langley, for instance, whom his contemporaries expected
to become the inventor of the airplane, was a much better trained sci-
entist than the Wright Brothers. As secretary of what was then
America’s leading scientific institution, the Smithsonian in
Washington, he also had all the nation’s scientific resources at his dis-
posal. But even though the gasoline engine had been invented by
Langley’s time, he preferred to ignore it. He believed in the steam
engine. As a result his airplane could fly; but because of the steam
engine’s weight, it could not carry any load, let alone a pilot. It need-
ed the convergence of mathematics and the gasoline engine to pro-
duce the airplane.