Peter Watson, writing in yesterday’s Observer, feels innovation isn’t what it used to be. Although his piece is worth reading in full, here are some key paragraphs:

"The year 2005 can’t begin to compete with 1905 in terms of important innovations. Last week’s announcement that British and Korean scientists have successfully cloned human embryos only reinforces the point. What else of real importance has happened this year?

[...] Yes, we are dazzled by mobile phones, cameras, iPods, satellite-digital-interactive television, laptops and the www, by laser-guided surgery and bombs, by DNA fingerprinting, and now by cloning. These are not small things but do they change the way we think in important - in fundamental - directions?

[...] What great ideas or transformations have been introduced in the half-century since 1950? A measly two stand comparison with the quantum, the gene, the unconscious and all the other great innovations of the past. These are the pill and the internet. All the others you might name - the transistor, the structure of DNA, space travel, tranquillisers, beta-blockers, immunosuppressants, John Rawls’ theory of justice, postmodernism, superstrings - are consolidations of existing ideas."

Now, I’m no historian, and I don’t have an interesting-looking book on the history of ideas to sell, either. But I’m still uneasy about the last line of that last paragraph. It’s like sitting at the start of the industrial revolution, wearily eying Watt’s steam engine, and saying "ah, but it’s only the consolidation of an existing idea".

The statement would be true - Watt improved on Savery’s first engine by applying Newcomen’s innovations in gun making to bore a cylinder. But, given subsequent events, it would also have been wrong to conclude from that that it was not going to change the way the world thought "in important - in fundamental - directions". It seems slightly odd to determine the importance of an innovation (incremental vs discontinuous) by its origins, rather than by the impact it has, or might have.

Perhaps Watson deals with this problem in his book. But, as a general point, I wonder if judging the implications of an innovation requires much more knowledge than talent-spotting the big innovations in isolation? And if someone says things aren’t like they used to be, one should ask if what they’re looking for ever really existed and - if it did - are they looking in the right places for more of it today?

Maybe the nature of ideas is changing. Maybe, unlike Watson, I don’t pay enough attention to cultural thought, where there may be a dearth of original work these days. But, even given all that, I’m not sure I’m willing to accept a thesis that says things ain’t what they used to be when, even at key points in history - the "what used to be" to which the thesis relates - such a statement would have appeared just as bald as it appears today.

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