Organizing Research

Here's an article in Angewandte Chemie that could probably have been published in several other places, since it's not specifically about chemistry. It's titled "The Organization of Innovation - The History of an Obsession", from Caspar Hirschi at St. Gallen in Switzerland, and it's a look at how both industrial and academic research have been structured over the years. He starts off with an article fromThe Economist on the apparent slowdown in innovation. This idea has attained wider currency in recent years (Tyler Cowen's The Great Stagnation is an excellent place to start, although it's not just about innovation). I should note that the Economist article does not buy into this theory. Hirschi dissents, too, but from another direction: Despite what the authors would have us believe, the “innovation blues” lamented in the The Economist have little to do with the current course of technological development. The source of the perceived problem arises instead from a sense of disappointment over the fact that their innovation theory does not hold up to its empirical promise. The theory is made up of a chain of causation that sees science as the most important driving force behind innovation, and innovation as the most important driving force for the economy, and an organizational principle maintaining that the three links in the chain function most efficiently under market-oriented com- petition. The problem with this theory is that only the first part of its causal chain...
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Who Discovers and Why Source Type: blogs