TheThreePercent

If I had a nickel for every technology-oriented innovation program I have seen cut when times got tough.  NASA has shut down the famous NIAC, Nasa Institute for Advanced Concepts. 

I’m not going to ponder the reasons for this cut.  The reasons are always the same.  What I will say is that it was both inevitable and avoidable - inevitable because truly innovative thinking along purely technical lines is difficult to find even with a wide net, and when you do find it, the innovations are typically divorced from strong business concept innovation.  It is avoidable, because ‘biztech’ programs know how to stand strong in tough times.

The few programs I have seen which merge business innovation thinking with inventive technical ideas tend not only to survive but to be virtually ‘unkillable.’

Now here’s where a lot of people will miss the point.  I am not saying that technical innovations must be submitted with a business plan and “sell out” to crass money-making schemes.  What I am saying is that if the inventor of a technology has also truly explored how to apply that technology to change the patterns of how people organize themselves, then the proposal to develop the project is closer to money, and the program that supports such submissions is better able to articulate why it can generate more value than is spent on it.

Technical invention is about playing with patterns – combining different tools in novel ways.  Business concept invention does the same thing.  It would be natural to create a team of scientists from different fields like optics, microelectronics, and genomics (that’s what gave us the gene sequencer after all), but to many poor scientists whose funding gets cut by the bad-ole-CEO, the notion of adding a business modeler (a person who practices the science of business concepts) is not only odd – it is often considered heresy.  Sigh.