Innovators must follow Frank’s example

To the flagship conference on innovation held by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta). Dapper chairman Chris Powell, an advertising chief, opens with a straw man proposal: we can’t be looking, he says, for some fancy bit of technological kit that will solve all our problems in one go.

Well, Chris, I’ve spent a lifetime arguing and looking for just such a gadget. So will I go along with your view that innovation must be incremental, or about the combination of different disciplines and insights, or about business models? I fear not.

We don’t need to go “way beyond” the old-fashioned view of innovation as intimately related to technology. This oh-so-rounded doctrine is just an apology for the shockingly weak levels of research and development in much of the UK’s private sector and all of its public sector, bar defence.

Yes, adopters of innovations are important. Yes, as Nesta research suggests, lead users can be important to innovation. But as Innovation Nation, a recent Department of Innovation, Universities & Skills white paper, is forced to concede, “excessive focus on lead users carries the danger that their voice will dominate and it is by no means certain that their specific requirements will be well-connected to the needs of users in the mass market”.

To his credit, Powell invokes the ambitious spirit of John F Kennedy’s space race. Nesta chief executive Jonathan Kestenbaum follows up by invoking Robert F Kennedy’s call for passion, reason and courage. But it proves to be Tim Berners-Lee addressing us via videolink, not Bob Geldof and Gordon Brown strutting the stage, who is the most courageously rational of the speakers ­ and the only one to be unfashionably dispassionate.

While all agree far too easily that the “R” part of R&D should be interdisciplinary and based on openness and partnership, only Berners-Lee makes a decent case for this. His Web Science Research Initiative, based at Southampton University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is right to employ the varied tools of computer science, economics and psychology to produce what it calls “the fundamental scientific advances necessary to guide the future design and use” of the web. As Berners-Lee observes, the phenomenon of large-scale spam could not have been predicted from the software protocols that first gave us email.

That’s one thing. It’s another to say, as Saint Geldof does to ecstatic applause, that innovators must realise that we are running our of air, water and land; that innovation must be local, co-operative and open-source; that it must be about listening to your customers. When Berners-Lee first developed the web in 1989, he didn’t do much fretting about limits, collaborators or listening. Nor, at the conference, does he flatter his audience as fantastic innovators, as Gordon Brown does.

Instead, calmly and coolly, he spells out what’s really important in corporate innovation. We must give innovators time and space. Let them generalise. Don’t dictate the ends of research. Don’t look for return on investment. And remember the quotation attributed to Einstein: “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research.” When they started, Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page listened to customers as little as Berners-Lee. Their innovation was not just to respond to need, but also to create a whole new talent for searching.

And they did it their way.