BIG POTATOES

In 2005, China’s engineers and scientists completed a new railway. Splicing through mountains five kilometres high and underground rock formations where the temperatures run at -30°C, the new line stretches from Golmud in the province of Qinghai to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. No fewer than 1,142 km long, it was finished three years ahead […]

In 1928, while on holiday, the Scots biologist and pharmacologist Alexander Fleming accidentally left a number of cultures of staphylococcus bacteria uncovered. He returned to find the growth of bacteria in one dish inhibited by a growing blue-green fungus, Penicillium notatum. Penicillin, which Fleming named after filtering it off from a hot solution of the […]

Today, innovation often feels called upon to apologise for the drain on resources it represents, and for the dangers it may bring. No wonder it just as often portrays itself as broadly predictable. [1] To gain support, it can pretend to be a smooth process, uninterrupted by false turns, intractable difficulties, personal clashes, or budgetary […]

It offends contemporary sensibilities to say so, but what Thomas Edison famously said of genius – that it is one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration – remains largely true of innovation. Given that mankind’s imaginings are so often, nowadays, confined to lurid scenes of future chaos, the power and utility of scientific, […]

In our cynical, short-attention-span age, it has become imperative to rally to the defence of pure, basic, long-term research. R&D isn’t just D. Without aggressive R, there will be no major, new or surprising industries. Governments and business have steadily backed off from investing in pure research. A key moment, perhaps, came in 1993, when […]

Innovation cannot prosper without curiosity, serendipity, unpredictable outcomes, inspiring vision, and sheer hard work. But these things are principles, not models of innovation. Market forces may limit innovation, but innovation is too big to be placed on a hockey stick of initial loss followed by profitability, or on a tapering S-curve of market saturation. Nor […]

Experts on innovation always agree that it is speeding up ‘exponentially’. But is that true? In 1965, in just four pages, the later co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, noted that the ‘complexity for minimum component costs’ of integrated circuits – that is, the number of transistors per chip that yielded the minimum cost per transistor […]

The full entry of China and India into the world economy doesn’t just mean billions more consumers aspiring to Western lifestyles. It also means that the world can benefit from billions of innovating brains. It’s a moment to broaden horizons, expect much more, and expand every kind of ambition. First, though, Britain and the West […]