Page 135 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

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128 THE PRACTICE OF INNOVATION

Prussian War, had shown that the telegraph was by no means “good
enough.” But the real point is not why receptivity changed. It is that
every authority in 1861 enthusiastically predicted overwhelming
receptivity when Reis demonstrated his instrument at a scientific
meeting. And every authority was wrong.
But, of course, the authorities can also be right, and often are. In
1876–77, for instance, they all knew that there was receptivity for
both a light bulb and a telephone—and they were right. Similarly,
Edison, in the 1880s, was supported by the expert opinion of his time
when he embarked on the invention of the phonograph, and again the
experts were right in assuming high receptivity for the new device.
But only hindsight can tell us whether the experts are right or
wrong in their assessment of the receptivity for this or that knowl-
edge-based innovation.
Nor do we necessarily perceive, even by hindsight, why a partic-
ular knowledge-based innovation has receptivity or fails to find it.
No one, for instance, can explain why phonetic spelling has been so
strenuously resisted. Everyone agrees that nonphonetic spelling is a
major obstacle in learning to read and write, forces schools to devote
inordinate time to the reading skill, and is responsible for a dispro-
portionate number of reading disabilities and emotional traumas
among children. The knowledge of phonetics is a century old at
least. Means to achieve phonetic spelling are available in the two
languages where the problem is most acute: any number of phonetic
alphabets for English, and the much older, forty-eight-syllable Kana
scripts in Japanese. For both countries there are examples next door
of a successful shift to a phonetic script. The English have the suc-
cessful model of German spelling reform of the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury; the Japanese, the equally successful—and much earlier—pho-
netic reform of the Korean script. Yet in neither country is there the
slightest receptivity for an innovation that, one would say, is badly
needed, eminently rational, and proven by example to be safe, fairly
easy, and efficacious. Why? Explanations abound, but no one really
knows.
There is no way to eliminate the element of risk, no way even to
reduce it. Market research does not work—one cannot do market
research on something that does not exist. Opinion research is prob-
ably not just useless but likely to do damage. At least this is what the
experience with “expert opinion” on the receptivity to knowledge-
based innovation would indicate.