While working on our report on Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks, one of my favourite SciFi authors, Neal Stephenson, popped up with an essay on Innovation Starvation.

It echoes Tyler Cowen‘s arguments that all the easy big stuff has been done,  and that all we have left to look forward to are incremental improvements rather than world changing technologies.

Stephenson, being a science fiction writer, looks at space as an example where a culture of risk avoidance, cost cutting and politics combine to stifle innovation. As he points out, even China’s space program is merely copying what the USA and Soviet Union were doing 50 years ago rather than doing anything innovative.

It is undoubtedly a problem that plagues the world.  Whether it is large ambitious space programs, or providing a government stimulus for technology companies, the emphasis is always on avoiding failure, which involves avoiding anything innovative.  The million lost by a failed company always generates more headlines for governments than the hundred million successfully leveraged as we can see with the furore over Solyndra – although governments have a poor track record of picking winners.

So how can we kick start global innovation? As I argue in Using Emerging Technologies to Address Global Risks we need to focus on the big issues that we can all agree on. Water might be a good start.

Over the past five years I have come across numerous innovative approaches to water scarcity, from desalination plants that double as greenhouses to nanostructured membranes that dramatically cut the energy needed for desalination, but I cant remember a single one of them attracting significant investment. That wasn’t because the technology is poor, it is simply because of the costs involved in getting it to market put it outside the risk which any early stage investor would be comfortable with. Raising $50 million for social networking is relatively simple, but for water remediation it is a stretch too far. Development times in excess of 3 years and uncertainty about who will pay for the technology combine to make it almost unfundable.

For a small fraction of the current cost of dealing with drought – something that will only increase in the future – we could develop a suite of technologies to mitigate the shortage of potable water. But we won’t.

I’m not convinced by the innovation starvation argument, I think we have plenty of innovation but we lack the political will to deploy them.  The challenge isn’t so much stimulating innovation as effectively making the case for governments and international institutions to use it.

Thomas Friedman in this weekends New York Times echoes my recent thoughts on how to get us out of the credit crunch recession:

As we invest taxpayer money, let’s do it with an eye to starting a new generation of biotech, info-tech, nanotech and clean-tech companies, with real innovators, real 21st-century jobs and potentially real profits for taxpayers. Our motto should be, “Start-ups, not bailouts: nurture the next Google, don’t nurse the old G.M.’s.”

I think the same is true in Europe. We do have world class science on which to base innovation, and a whole host of dinosaurs that will become extinct whether we as taxpayers fund them or not, but my US colleagues do have the impression that most European entrepreneurs still try to work a 35 hour week and take 8 weeks vacation per year.

Isn’t quite that bad, but in terms of entrepreneurial culture the US ‘can do’ attitude goes a long way to getting technologies off the ground despite the problems I highlighted. Some of the more interesting deals I have been involved with recently are ones where the entrepreneurs made sure that I “got” it though sheer perseverance. Once we are past that stage, getting the deal done can be even more challenging, especially when dealing with companies, lawyers and investors in time zones ranging from Bangkok to San Francisco, but good entrepreneurs (and investors) shouldn’t let a little thing like sleep get in the way.

The current situation may be rather trickier than the dot com years, but economic turmoil often throws up a host of new opportunities for anyone still watching out for them. I’m seeing some fantastic deals, with some great technologies at sensible prices, and doing more of that and less of the bailing out of lame duck industries is where our future economy will lie, and my bank manager (Barclays) keeps exhorting me to tell everyone that they are still lending money and doing deals.

The new US administration seems to be moving quickly, allowing the use of embryonic stem cells and Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu addressed all the national labs yesterday. A couple of the heartening points reported at CosmicVariance are

• The DOE is the principal supporter of physical sciences in the US, and the physical sciences are the conernstone of prosperity for the US future.
• Restimulation (is that a word?) of the economy is #1 on the priority list. DOE will get considerable funds in the stimulus package, not just to get the economy going but to provide a long term path for the US.

The grand challenge that the DoE is setting in terms of sustainable energy is certainly laudable. Whether or not you believe in anthropogenic global warming or have any faith in the measures taken to date is irrelevant in the face of the absurdity of over reliance on a single form of energy.It certainly seems to have inspired and excited plenty of people…

I am truly awed by the vision presented by Chu here, and so hopeful that we can get our country back on a path to long term prosperity by supporting research in the physical sciences. At least half of our present economy relies on the knowledge gained in the 20th century about our physical world…one can only imagine the revolutions to come.

Following on from my previous post, and addressing the thesis that imitation – not innovation – is woven into the fabric of the 20th century venture economy, Umair Haque at recently penned a nice article at harvardbusiness.org called “Asleep at the Wheel of Creative Destruction”

Here’s the question everyone wants to ask:

Q. Why does President Obama have to invest a likely trillion dollars to renew, well, pretty much the entire industrial base of the economy – to seed new auto, energy healthcare, education, finance, and agricultural industries (to name just a few)?

A. Because today’s crop of apathetic, risk-averse venture investors didn’t.

Now that a reliable online plagiarism checker is available for theses/reports/homework, perhaps it’s time to develop one for investment ideas/business plans?

Robert Service has a nice (but short) piece at Science highlighting the problems face by the Obama administration in implementing the new nanotech bill.

As usual, what seems perfectly simple task to an outsider results in a series of political power squabbles, especially when it comes to appointing a “NanoTzar—for all EHS research across the 25 federal agencies that are part of the NNI.”

I enjoyed Rick Weiss’”Good Riddance” piece directed at the outgoing US administration, and it probably echoes  the views of many US based researchers.

Good riddance to the lies, the deception, the White House-edited pseudoscience reports. Good riddance to the stacked science advisory committees, the faux peer-review of proposed regulations, the junkyard claims of “junk science.”

Good riddance to the scientist manqué at the top of the Environmental Protection Agency who big-footed actual evidence for political convenience. Good riddance to the leadership at the Office of Science and Technology Policy that supported President Bush’s skepticism about the need to address climate change aggressively.

Good riddance to the vice-president who thought the telecom revolution was about better bugging of innocent citizens’ phone calls. Good riddance to the president who cared more about human embryos than he did about children living in the lower Ninth Ward.

I have been hearing lots of positive things about Obama’s science team (mainly from US based colleagues who may or may not have an interest in positions/funding so the traditional academic infighting may resume once the honeymoon is over), so let’s hope that they can deliver on the promises and set an example to the rest of the world.

However having good scientists is not the only criteria for good science. The 2001 outbreak of foot and mouth disease cost the economy some £20 billion as a result of what is now seen as a disastrously wrong decision by the Chief Scientist Sir David King to slaughter animals rather than vaccinate them (as happened in most other countries), perhaps illustrating the problems of putting a chemist in charge of epidemiology. The result? Half of the countryside out of bounds and pyres of dead carcasses being burned for weeks on end.

New president Obama’s speech was an oratorial tour de force, if somewhat grim in it’s outlook, but it was good to hear that he understands what many politicians don’t – that to get out of the current mess we find ourselves in, it all starts with great science (although this may take longer than from now to the next election).

Without the technological foundations upon which to base ideas all we have is, well,  dot.coms and whatever we just lost in the current crisis.

Preparing for a week of Obama mania (I know several friends in the nanotech business who are heading to Washington for the show) I can’t help being reminded of Tony Blair’s 1997 election win which generated similar expectations, followed by the slow realisation that the guy was just an ordinary politician, just as self centred, insincere and incompetent as the government that we had replaced (Unlike many of my US colleagues I haven’t been angling for a post in the administration so I’m allowed to be cynical).

Fortunately I’m not alone in this view which significantly reduces my chance of being lynched by some of my uber democrat friends when I’m back in San Francisco next month – James Delingpole in this week’s Spectator articulates this from a more political standpoint.

From my nanotech/business point of view, what would be the consequences of Obama (or Blair MkII to continue Delingpoles analogy). Well economically his hands are tied, and no matter how good the rhetoric may be,  science is a long term project. We know from the Blair years that the standard procedure for anything that can’t be fixed before the next election is to set up a special commission to investigate it and hope the issue has gone away before anyone has to report back, and I can’t help wondering if all the pronouncements about science funding will be treated similarly by the incoming administration. Back in 2004 Tony Blair enthused “Nanotechnology opens up huge possibilities… but we must move fast if we are to stay in the race” and then kicked the subject into the long grass.

Certainly in the UK the government has dithered over nanotech at every opportunity, whether on funding or safety, and despite Blair’s ‘deep personal interest’ in the subject, one often got the impression that as soon as the meeting was over it was entirely forgotten about. Some funding is finally trickling out, but that follows years of thumb twiddling, and prevarication, probably due to the fact that none of the politics and economics graduates in the government had a clue what nanotechnology was unless they had to react to Prince Charles. While we all know that science is the engine of innovation, and therefore economic growth, the ongoing recession means that governments may just keep chucking money at the problem until there isn’t any left for science.

I’m sure Obama already has every single issue pressure group in the US and beyond clogging up his staffs mailboxes already, from the usual nanobot lunatics to fawning syncophants hoping to make a buck from congressional earmarks. However, as a first term president in a recession his main priority will to be getting re elected and getting America to feel good about itself (and equally important making the rest of the world feel good about America), so I suspect that a lot of the stuff that isn’t directly relevant to rebuilding the economy or stopping people killing each other in the Middle East will be just background noise for the new presidential ears.