As Insight Labs heads to NASA later this week, we wanted to better understand how the factors that once made up the American fascination with space exploration have changed since the days of “The Right Stuff” and the Apollo missions. Earlier, we talked with Lab alum Adam Frankel, a former senior speechwriter to President Obama and now the executive director of Digital Promise, about the ways in which innovation does and does not intersect with today’s political rhetoric. Next, we decided to turn to two more Lab veterans whose job it is to see where the culture of innovation is headed next.
Robert C. Wolcott, who participated in our session with the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, is the executive director of the Kellogg Innovation Network and a co-founder of Clareo Partners. Allan L. Platt, a financial executive and also a co-founder of Clareo, was a member of our Lab with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. They brought along Clareo’s Michael J. Lippitz, who with Wolcott co-authored the book Grow From Within: Mastering Corporate Entrepreneurship and
Innovation. Labs Content Director Andrew Benedict-Nelson asked the group to assess where space exploration fits into America’s shifting culture of innovation.
Andrew Benedict-Nelson: So I would like to ask you some questions based on the following premise. In the postwar United States, there was a vibrant culture of innovation that also happened to provide strong support to the project of space exploration. Today, we have a similarly vibrant but different culture of innovation that may not have the same natural affinity with space exploration.
To get us started, how would each of you characterize that postwar culture of innovation? What are some of its salient aspects that people today might not be aware of?
Robert Wolcott: The Cold War was obviously a significant factor and major motivator and focusing mechanism for government spending and research and development. There was an odd simpatico between the imminent threat we felt and our desire to apply our research and ingenuity.
Another factor was that the United States represented about half of the global gross domestic product, which is an interesting factor. It’s not so simple as to say it was easy because we had so much of the GDP. When a business or organization is on top and really leading an industry, there is actually a risk that it will become less innovative. So I think – and this is not something I’ve written a dissertation on or anything – I think there was a collusion between these two factors: the Cold War and the fact that the United States was the predominant economic power in the world. That was built on several previous decades of invention and innovation.
An interesting side note – early on, Adolf Hitler believed that it would not make much of a difference if the United States entered the war because we had not produced enough gifted engineers. What he didn’t understand was that in that same period the United States had created textbooks and other techniques for scaling engineering. Hitler and others believed that to become a great engineer you had to have been an apprentice, that you had to put in a great number of years before you were ready to work on a project like an aircraft. America proved that wrong during the war.
So coming off the strength of victory in the war, plus having half of the GDP and an economy that was not destroyed by the war, then having the Cold War mechanisms – those things together provided a lot of focus to innovation. John F. Kennedy’s “we choose to go to the Moon” speech provided an additional focus for a lot of that passion as well as that anxiety. It focused on something that was bigger than anything humanity had achieved before.
Michael Lippitz: The only thing I would add to Rob’s summary is that one of the major things that came out of the World War II period was what is called “the Age of Big Science.” It was the idea of very large-scale projects where big companies – the Westinghouses, IBM’s, and AT&T’s of the world – would partner with government and university labs to bring major projects to fruition. It was that combination of the industrial execution with government money and the vibrancy of academia – and the cooperation and networks among them – that really drove things. That’s particularly relevant to the NASA story.
Allan Platt: I would also add to that the media environment of the time. Coming out of World War II, there was a strong sense of collective experience that came from the suffering of the Great Depression and the war. On top of that there was an emerging mass media that meant everybody was seeing the same newscasts every night and getting a lot of similar messages. So there was a great deal of harmony and consensus. At the same time, the Cold War provided a lot of focus on NASA’s only competitor. All of that, combined with the discipline that came out of the recent military experience, tended to support big projects like going to the Moon. It may have been unique to that period of time. It was the first time an entire continent had truly been stitched together to form a single information environment.
RW: I would also point out that because of the advocate of relativity and quantum mechanics in the early part of the 20th century, by mid-century we started to see things like transistors and integrated circuits. These technologies opened up paths of technological development that weren’t even on the radar before – which is an appropriate metaphor. Biotechnology also popped up as a factor.
So one question I would be asking is where we are on the grand scale of theoretical scientific changes, and how are we applying in relation to those things? As much as I am a free-market and private-sector guy, I don’t buy the notion that the private sector would have developed the Internet on its own, or many of the other foundational technologies we have today. Maybe it could have been done by a monopolistic company like the old AT&T or IBM. Maybe if they had monopoly money to play with. But I do see some risk now that the United States could miss out on the scientific breakthroughs of the next two or three generations.
ML: In 1945, there was a report that came out by an adviser to the White House named Vannevar Bush called “Science, The Endless Frontier.” The concept was that if you put a whole bunch of money into science, you’re going to get a whole bunch of technologies and products out the other end, this huge set of riches, and that is what led to huge amounts of investment in AT&T Bell Labs, IBM, and other corporate laboratories.
ABN: Let’s talk about the culture of innovation today, then. What are the contrasting features with the postwar era? What are some key features of today’s culture of innovation that you think might be underappreciated?
RW: I’m assuming you’re talking about the development of new technology, but we actually have a very broad definition of innovation that includes the way companies or organizations develop and operate. Most people don’t think about it that way. But one thing that has happened – and even most of the people who know about it haven’t grasped the magnitude of what has happened – is the extraordinary increase in the number of people and places in the world who are attempting to do significant research and development. In the 50s and 60s you basically had the United States and Europe, and then by the 70s and 80s you had Japan. Then there was the heavy math, science, physics, and military research that the Soviet Union was pretty good at. But other than that, there was very little happening anywhere else on the planet. That’s not a bias – that’s just a fact.
Today, innovation is happening all over the world. More and more countries and universities are working hard to come up the learning curve to become significant contributors from a competitive perspective. That is a profound development and a positive development in the sense that we have many more paths of innovation going on around the world than at any time in history. But that also comes with challenges, such as figuring out exactly where all these developments are going on, figuring out how to connect all the strains of development, and managing an environment where not everybody is going to be publishing in English anymore. Most scientists still learn English and work in English, but there is no guarantee that that will be true going forward. But this is a profound change, because you are going to have an amount of experimentation that is an order of magnitude greater than anything that has previously been going on in the world.
AP: Another one of the differences in this country, and to some extent other countries, has been the development of a robust venture capital market to fund innovation, development, and entrepreneurship. The same could be said for a lot of other kinds of research. The financial resources 20 years ago were a lot more concentrated in the hands of government or large laboratories. To some extent that still happens, but one of the aspects people point out about the current era is that there is lots of innovation happening on a smaller scale. You’ve got people like Steve Jobs who got started out in their garages and moved up from there. That’s been enabled by an availability of capital that might have been much more difficult to come by than in the decades before.
ML: Rob mentioned the greater diversity of organizations performing R&D. One of the things that happened there was that you still had areas that were very capital intensive, like the semiconductor industry, and even the Intels and IBMs of the world couldn’t fund them on their own. So you started to see research consortia come together where companies pooled their resources to try to reproduce the government largesse that wasn’t there anymore.
What the government – and in particular the Department of Defense – was doing in the postwar era was not only funding R&D, but acting as a big purchaser of technology products. In the 1960s, three-quarters of the product of Silicon Valley was going to the Department of Defense. What people don’t understand is that was very critical for the development of Silicon Valley. The government didn’t stand up Fairchild and all these other semiconductor companies. Instead, they placed orders saying that if they could reach such-and-such performance they would buy a certain number of them. They took those promises to the bank and were able to raise money based on those purchase promises.
That is something that has really changed today. The government is not the dominant purchaser anymore in nearly any area. Part of that has to do with the success of these industries, but it also has to do with the government withdrawing from that kind of work. The only area in which you still see it somewhat is with the National Institutes of Health. The large investment, purchasing, and regulatory influence there still makes a difference in how industries go forward.
AP: I would add that the talent pool has changed. Notwithstanding the fact that our education system has failed us in many ways, certainly the elite institutions are producing top-qualified scientists and engineers at a rate that is significantly greater than 40 or 50 years ago, though they’re not serving the whole population as well as they could. There’s also been a globalization of the talent market. You’re seeing greater diversity in the workforce and people coming from all parts of the world. Companies today are able to tap in to a rich talent pool, though there also seems to be a profound shortage. That may just be because of the demand generated by the degree of activity.
ML: There is a famous quote from Bill Joy, one of the funders of Sun Microsystems: “Most of the smart people in the world work for somebody else.” That’s the motif of today.
ABN: It seems to me that there are even more drivers of innovation today that couldn’t have even been imagined in the postwar era. What other new factors do we have today?
ML: Clearly the whole information technology revolution was not what they had in mind in that era. For them, it was electronics and chemicals that were going to change everybody’s lives. The notion of networks, information exchange, and information consolidation that is so central today was just not a part of the consciousness. Information at that time was hard to get. When Rob and I were doing our dissertations we had to go to the card catalogue or an actual library to get the information we wanted. The power of that kind of information exchange has forced people to be smarter and faster. You used to be able to make a market out of information disparity – it’s very hard to do that now.
RW: I’d still like to come back to the question of whether we’re only talking about technological innovation.
ABN: Well, it seems to me that an expansion of the idea of innovation to organizational structures or social innovation may be an aspect of this answer. If you want your example of innovation to be Steve Jobs, for instance, his real genius was not in pure research or technology but in business and product design. That’s an area that might not have counted as innovation in the same way during the postwar period.
RW: And integrating systems to create comprehensive consumer experiences. And changing industry structures in order to move new ideas and products forward, like he did with iTunes or mobile apps. There are dozens of drivers, especially if we cast the net incredibly wide. But I would say that on the highest level, global competition and global awareness are two of the most significant. Mike mentioned access to information; a particular cut of that is that people are much more aware of opportunities going on in the world today. That awareness has everything to do with what you do and what you work on.
Global competition has also made things quantitatively and qualitatively different from how they were a few decades ago. An example of that is that many companies have maintained their R&D budgets even through the downturn, whereas in the past a lot of companies would have slashed and burned in order to maintain their bottom line. That’s a sign that there’s an increasing awareness that innovation is a requirement, not a luxury.
Then there’s the social innovation – would you see the increasing innovation in the Untied States and other places around how to help people in other parts of the world were people not so aware of those challenges? We’ve had TV for a long time, but there is a big difference between the way we saw horrible things going on in the world on TV when we were growing up and the way people today connect with individuals through entities like Kiva. I would say competition, awareness, and access of information about opportunities – those are all drivers beyond those we mentioned before.
ABN: When you look at today’s culture of innovation and all the factors that the three of you just laid out, what aspects would seem to help the project of space exploration the most? And what aspects seem least compatible with space exploration?
AP: It would help to find gold on the Moon. There needs to be some kind of economic reason for sending material and human beings into space. It’s quite expensive.
RW: I would add that automation and robotics could significantly add to our abilities. We have to get beyond the idea of sending a machine up that will move some things around and send a few tests back. We’re getting way beyond that. In 10 or 20 years, I would be shocked if we could not have deep, visceral experiences of other places because of the quality and amount of data that could be sent back by robotics. Human beings won’t have to leave the planet to have the experience they would have had if we had thrown them on a vessel and sent them to Mars. In the long run we might take human beings to Mars to colonize if we continue to grow and require more space – who knows? But we can do a heck of a lot without having to actually put people on a vessel.
AP: That’s a great example of reducing the cost of space exploration. There needs to be encouragement of technologies that would further reduce that cost, whether it’s the cost of getting to space or fielding missions with robotic agents out there that don’t require life support and other things that are very costly.
RW: You’re also seeing that in aviation with unmanned vehicles, which are finally taking on a life of their own in military applications. You are going to see even more of that in commercial applications in the next 20 years.
ML: My not very generous point of view is that NASA really needs an overhaul in a fundamental way. Unlike the DoD, they haven’t had anybody shooting at them, which is one way to quickly figure out that your old culture isn’t working. The unmanned vehicle example is perfect. The Air Force resisted that for years because it went against their culture. It wasn’t sexy, it didn’t fit with their fighter pilot culture. It took a lot of effort over a lot of time to change that, not just drawing on the economics of what it takes to build planes, but also on the demonstrated capabilities of the unmanned vehicles in battle.
I think NASA is still stuck with the 1950s idea of Big Science and big machines to go do this. There are a lot of areas that could probably be explored with one-fifth of the budget. But that’s the problem with government bureaucracy and budgets – they never go back and say, “What’s our objective?” and then rebuild from there. You’re always looking at incremental funding from last year.
My other point is that without the Cold War, space exploration should be an inherently international effort. It hardly makes sense to have unlinked international space efforts unless you’re thinking you’re going to make war out there, which we are trying to avoid. I think we have been kind of half-hearted about international collaboration, and particularly NASA, who ought to be the leader of the effort.
ABN: Given the culture of innovation you describe and its relationship to space exploration, do you think there is any way that it would be possible for NASA to again become an organization that is undisputedly essential to innovation? What kind of changes would have to occur for that to happen?
ML: There is still a huge scientific and technical infrastructure that NASA has built up over the years. They are still a major funder and center of activity in any different number of scientific areas. It’s a real national resource in that regard. But how they would do what you describe is a very complicated question and you’d have to get into a fair amount of detail about their actual capabilities and competencies. I think a lot of it would involve investigating their actual infrastructure and overhead. They’ve got Kennedy Space Center and Johnson Space Center and all these different facilities. They’ve got to be costing them a huge amount to maintain that should be redirected.
Developing a more international program would involve diplomatic negotiations – which NASA could lead. My guess is that most of the other countries would welcome that kind of effort. Like the semiconductor companies of the 80s, none of them can afford to do it all by themselves. There should be a broad program that they can all work on together. That could actually be quite motivational.
AP: I am highly skeptical of the “Moon Shot” approach of setting a big goal like going back to the Moon or to Mars in ten years. I’m not certain that they would have the same rallying of forces given the difference in the innovation context. And if it failed it would backfire miserably. It’s almost a dangerous strategy.
NASA’s relevance will be in its ability to provide resources, funds, and support to innovation, primarily involving space exploration. It needs to be focused to a certain extent, but obviously lots of innovations came out of NASA that now have applications that have nothing to do with space exploration, like Tempur-Pedic beds. I would also say that they could probably learn from the private sector how to be more of a sponsor and supporter rather than the single project orchestrater.