Patterns of innovation

There's a very interesting analysis by McKinsey and the World Economic Forum on innovation called "Building an innovation nation". It shows how different regions stack-up on the global innovation map and the authors identify assets that are required to drive innovation. It's worth reading, and prompts me to make a couple of comments, some of which have to do with the random nature of our world...

My comments on the piece are in three areas:

1. I'm not sure about the correlation between patents and actual innovation. To give an example: Twitter brings enormous innovation of the real kind (i.e. used by actual people and companies in the economy), but I haven't heard about them filing any patent whatsoever. Another example without any patent would be Jamendo a company that is transforming distribution of music with their service for commercial consumption of music...


2. in hindsight correlations often look like causality and we can build great theories about what made something successful... theories that can be statistically verified over a period of time, but do not necessarily constitute the "truth" if there's such a thing. Reading Taleb's Fooled by randomness and it would make sense to extend the study to past periods of History when there was innovation without any patenting system and without established institutions like governments or companies doing anything to facilitate innovation. Among the excellent examples to study is the period during which the craftsmen of France self-organized to invent practices (innovate), deliver projects like major cathedrals (requiring sophisticated maths to be designed) and to educate the next generations of craftsmen (today we would be speaking of knowledge management, except that these guys did not have Oracle databases or other sophisticated It equipment)


3. which brings me to the last point: to me the world is a chaotic place that you cannot shape with recipes. All one can do, whether a CEO or the President of the most powerful nation on Earth, is create turbulence that causes the overall self-adapting system to change its form... taking into account the fact that other turbulences exert their own influence (see current financial crisis)...