Taking the mountain to Mohamed. By Stephan Sigrist

If you only think technology when you think innovation, you’ve forgotten the most important aspect: people. And yet it has always been that way. Technology has had to adapt to society, but at the same time society has had to be made aware of new technology. True progress requires humanities experts who think about the social ground where technical innovations will germinate. Friendly machines are needed. And companies that address society’s needs in good time. That’s good for marketing. Above all, however, it forms the basis of sustainable renewal.

Let’s start with a little experiment. Concentrate. Close your eyes for a moment. Take a deep, calm breath. Now think of an important innovation of the last twenty years.
What appeared before your mind’s eye?
A smartphone? A tablet, or possibly an electric car? If one of the above, then you’re like the majority of people. You associate innovation with a technology, a device or a product. And you’re right: products like these are real innovations; novelties that have gained broad acceptance in the market and redefined the way we live. They make our lives easier or save natural resources, i.e. these innovations are synonymous with progress and therefore with increasing prosperity and a better quality of life.

The long waves of progress

The academic world also sees technology as the starting point of innovation. The model of the Kondratieff waves, or super-cycles, is considered an important basis for analysing the interaction between innovation, technological progress and economic growth to this day. It goes back to 1926, when russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff published his theory of long waves in which he described economic trends in terms of cyclical phases. According to this theory, the long waves of the positive cycle are triggered by the bunching of innovations caused by new basic technologies, leading to an economic upswing on the back of huge investments – examples are the steam engine, which brought about industrialised production as well as mobility through the railways; petrochemicals, coupled with individual mobility and a wealth of infrastructural projects; and now information technology. once an innovation is established, the theory posits that investments into it decline, leading to a downswing. In this critical phase, gaps or shortages cause new basic innovations to arise, which in turn initiate the next upswing. The construction of the european railways therefore received a crucial boost because existing transport technologies such as horse-drawn vehicles couldn’t deliver the rapidly growing volumes of industrially manufactured goods quickly enough. The essential feature of Kondratieff’s model is that it assumes that far-reaching economic and social transformation takes place as a consequence of stimulus applied by technical innovation. The connection between technology and society is made. The formula “innovation equals technology” is therefore not the whole story. Alongside technologies, manifesting themselves primarily in products, social innovations – in other words adaptations of social or economic structures to the new technologies – also play a huge role in innovation processes. Austrian sociologist and science researcher Helga Nowotny even assumes that the spread of a new technology must inevitably cause new forms of social organisation for technical changes to be absorbed in a form acceptable to society. She cites the introduction of insurance as a response to the 19th century Industrial revolution as one example. Nowotny argues that the welfare state or private risk-reducing solutions had to be introduced to deal with the risks of an everyday life transformed by the steam engine – occupational accidents, unemployment and retirement.

Despite this insight, however, the public, politicians and many companies still focus mainly on technology when they think about innovations in our near and distant future: the vision of medicine in the 21st century is shaped by personalised drugs that will only be prescribed to patients if the results of genetic testing show that the medication will actually be efficacious. And the most important drivers of the energy transition are thought to be new forms of sustainable power generation, electric vehicles and intelligent algorithms that filter the really relevant information from rapidly rising data mountains, thereby providing us with better bases for decision making. Once the technology is established, is the general expectation, the economy, political situation and society – in other words, human beings and their habits – will adjust automatically.

Co-evolution of technology and society

According to nowotny’s view, Kondratieff’s linear conception that technology serves as the primary trigger of innovation, which then has economic consequences and therefore has to be embedded in society further downstream, appears too limited. She assumes a co-evolutionary process in which technical and social aspects determine one another. Simultaneous development of technical and social evolution would then require a parallel process in which social structures and business models would be considered as new technological approaches arose. These social and economic constructs would be prerequisites for a technology to be used on a widespread basis.

As a logical consequence, we have to think beyond the technical parameters of innovations. With demographic shifts occurring in the age pyramid, for example, an attempt was made to address the acute shortage of nursing staff in many countries and particularly cities with robots. The machines were intended to help the elderly deal more easily with their everyday routines. The simplest solution did not work. It turned out that the combination of gripping arms, electrical fingers, a head with sensors for eyes and a monitor body, covered with plastic skin, had to be made to look friendlier. When the robots were given a bear’s face, they were accepted by people in need of care: the more emotive the robots’ appearance, voice and movements were, the readier senior citizens were to put up with an electronic substitute for human companionship. Social innovation goes even further than that, though. For example, there is an increasing number of new instruments for self-diagnosis – e.g. for diabetes, pregnancy and soon maybe even cancer – that save patients the trek to the doctor’s surgery. They also require those patients to be better informed so that they can interpret the measuring data correctly and respond adequately.

Personalised medicine needs financing models which will ensure that pharma companies can recoup their investments into research despite focusing on ever shrinking markets. Likewise, the energy transition is by no means solely dependent on the availability of resource-neutral fuels, but also to a large extent on the population’s readiness to finance them and to change their energy consumption behaviour. And in certain problem areas innovation may even be entirely emancipated from technologies and products. The challenges relating to the dramatic increase in type II diabetes and the associated cost suggest that it can only be combated effectively and financed in the long term if people make lifestyle changes. Products can help. But the actual foundation has to be a value shift towards prevention. Coupled with this shift, incentive systems, education programmes and preventive offerings need to be developed which, in turn, will provide a platform for new business models.

Targeted adaptation of social structures

Innovation, therefore, has to be defined holistically. that may sound like a simple matter, but its implementation could be further-reaching than is initially apparent. It is therefore becoming increasingly important for companies and governments to start thinking about how to adapt social structures in a targeted way when they plan long-term innovation projects, and to enable the acceptance of technological innovations by initiating such adaptation. The urgency seems all the greater since a new technology can be available within a few months, but the social value shift normally takes significantly longer. Moreover, social inno- vation has to be supported in its own right for the simple reason that many present and future challenges cannot be solved with technology alone.

As a consequence of this extended definition of innovation and its implementation, a double need arises: long-term planning horizons have to be set and the interaction of technology, industry and society has to be systematically addressed. This also implies an increased number of interdisciplinary research and development projects in which academics from the humanities will work hand in hand with natural scientists. It would likely be productive for both universities and enterprises if leading minds from psychology, sociology and political science were involved in technological developments early on so that innovations could be reviewed for their social acceptability. If the bottom line looks negative, the humanities experts could even develop new forms of social organisation, pilot-test them early and then promote them to key policy-makers and industry pundits to make sure that the innovations are actually used. More than ever, the objective should be not just to assess the technical potential and marketability of an invention, but to focus on the human side right from the start.

Stephan Sigrist is the founder and head of W.I.R.E. and has focused for many years on developments in the life sciences and long-term trends in industry and society. He has also authored many books and publications, advises companies and political institutions on strategic issues and is a regular speaker at international conferences.