History and Innovations
The cognitive and creative roots of invention
Salvatore Rizzello
Creative Process courtesy Andrea Boffett (Trakatan)
Is there a relationship between innovation and history? No two spheres could seem more remote. The former is unforeseeable before its revelation and as such, establishes novelty as it comes into being. The latter results from the tangle of personal illusions which fit into the one which gives us a common past, which we speak of as if it were a shared story.
But realistically, innovation and history are linked by an unbreakable bond of close reciprocity and influence. Not only because innovation makes history, which can be considered in a broad sense as a storyline of successive, discontinuous decisions, but also because innovation depends on history.
Since the work of Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883 – 1950) made its contribution to economic theory innovation has been viewed as the economic use of an invention which is released on the market. The introduction of a successful innovation, due to the genius or intuition of an entrepreneur, disrupts the existing equilibrium, creates new wealth and, thanks to competition, distributes it.
An innovation may also disrupt a social or institutional order and cause it to be reconstructed on a new level.
The simplicity of this model, however, is at risk of obscuring the complex nature of the phenomenon, which involves the creative and cognitive human dimension, as well as communication and the institutional spheres which regulate all social and economic relationships.
Let’s consider the cognitive and creative aspects that are the basis for invention. It is a predominantly unconscious mechanism, where the imagination plays with perception of data, deconstructing and reconstructing it until it comes up with a theoretically feasible approach, in the form of a strategy, the solution to a problem, an idiom or form of communication. As the result of this implicit process expressed in a shared communicative dimension, “entrepreneurial intuition” takes over, selecting the inventions which are worth the risk, investing limited resources and deciding where to exert lobbying pressure. Two other elements intervene here. The first, which is always unconscious, concerns the neural/cognitive characteristics of the decision-making process. The other, of an institutional nature, regards the level of availability and free access to information, and the concrete opportunities for the individual to assert his or her own will in a particular social context. The latter dimension mainly involves the environment, understood as the network of interpersonal relationships within organizations and the feed-back that is triggered between these and the institutional sphere.
If we examine the past in the light of these considerations, we can determine the birth of innovation and map out the paths of its distribution. Surprisingly, quite often one is confronted with non-linear routes that are inefficient and occasioned by random events that firm up over time. At times it is evident that some innovations that are more efficient than others have trouble getting established and are subjected to “negative” selection by the market. This occurs because, in innovative processes at the individual, organizational or institutional level, there are human perception mechanisms that allow us to represent external data, to give it meaning and to organize it in a communicative dimension. These mechanisms are imperfect and partial, especially in their representative capacity. They depend on individual genetics and experience. Or rather, on hereditary randomness which also has a cultural dimension, and an individual’s implicit and explicit, direct and indirect experience which accumulates over a lifetime: one’s history. Obviously history is never purely personal, yet it is also personal. Innovation occurs first of all in one’s personal history, which then becomes shared history, by means of a complex, non-linear process.
The same occurs within organizations where innovation depends on the cognitive (implicit) map shared by its members. Even in this dimension, previous experiences are expressed in the “know how”, which represents the uniqueness of the paths of an organization; innovation is grafted onto these, shaping their history.
