Post tag: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
“Innovating and Integrating Information Technology: Some Cautionary Notes”

Innovation & IntegrationInnovation and integration may be the organizational trend of the day, but just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither is innovation, and integrating innovation into organizations is even more of a challenge.

Innovation and integration are challenging activities. If they were easy to accomplish, there would be a lot more of it, it would be commonplace, and we would be living in a completely different world. But the reality is innovation—whether technological, social, economic, political, legal, scientific, or medical—does not happen on cue, so to speak, and more often than not, it happens by accident.

The eventual invention of the telephone, the discovery of plastics, and the creation of Viagara are but three examples of a long list of accidental innovations, which includes: microwave ovens, the Slinky, Play-Doh, Super Glue, Teflon, the Pacemaker, Velcro, X-Rays, chocolate chip cookies, potato chips, Post-It Notes, Corn Flakes, and Penicillin. The discovery of galaxies outside our own Milky Way by astronomer Edwin Hubble in the late 1920s—the scientific realization that changed our world view—is also an example of an accidental discovery—five hundred years after Galileo developed the telescope.

On the other side of the “innovation” coin is when an innovation is ignored.  A classic example is the invention of the digital camera at Kodak. It was summarily dismissed by company executives because they perceived camera “film” was their core product. Too late did they recognize their blunder. In January 2012 it declared chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Innovation is defined as: “the action or process of innovating.” Synonyms for innovation include: change, alteration, revolution, upheaval, transformation, metamorphosis, break-through.

Integration is defined as: an act or instance of combining into an integral whole; or an act or instance of integrating an organization, place of business, school, etc.

It can be said with a high degree of certainty that technological innovations we take for granted are manifold and have, in turn, influenced the shape and customs of cultures. According to Ryan Allis, a technology entrepreneur and investor who has been part of iContact, Connect and Hive. (source:  http://startupguide.com/about-the-authors/), these include:

Technological Innovations 
1. The controlled use of fire (400,000 BCE)
2. Phonetic language (100,000 BCE)
3. Trade and specialization (17,000 BCE)
4. Farming (15,000 BCE)
5. The Ship (4,000BCE)
6. The Wheel (3400 BCE)
7. Money (3000 BCE)
8. Iron (3000 BCE)
9. Written Language (2900 BCE)
10. The Legal System (1780 BCE)
11. The Alphabet (1050 BCE)
12. Steel (650 BCE)
13. Water Power (200 BCE)
14. Paper (105)
15. Movable Type (1040)
16. The Microscope (1592)
17. Electricity (1600)
18. The Telescope (1608)
19. The Engine (1712)
20. The Light Bulb (1800)
21. The Telegraph (1809)
22. The Electromagnet (1825)
23. Petroleum (1859)
24. The Telephone (1860)
25. The Vacuum Tube (1883)
26. Semiconductors (1896)
27. Penicillin (1896)
28. The Radio (1897)
29. The Electron (1897)
30. Quantum Physics (1900)
31. The Airplane (1903)
32. Television (1926)
33. The Transistor (1947)
34. DNA (1953)
35. The Integrated Circuit (1959)
36. The Internet (1969)
37. Microprocessors (1971)
38. The Mobile Phone (1973)
39. The Smartphone (2007)
40. The Quantum Computer (2011)

The movable type printing press was successful through Johannes Gutenberg’s work in the 15th century. Moreover, his “invention”—a vast improvement over the Chinese version of 500 Illiteracy in the Worldyears prior—led to a growing list of books, magazines, and newspapers, and the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions, and the so-called Information Age. These developments, in turn, increased the level of literacy in the world. Yet integration is not complete. Now in the 21st century there are still approximately 800 million people in the world who are illiterate—about 16% of the world’s population; mostly women in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. In other words, the spread, adoption, and integration of innovation takes time. Integration of innovations also takes time, not only in societies as a whole, but also in organizations, academic and otherwise.

Why? A recent article in the online “CIO Journal” section of the Wall Street Journal (dated June 17, 2015) has the headline “At Innovation Labs, Playing with Technology Is the Easy Part.” In this article the writer points out:

“For many companies with innovation labs, the road from eureka to real product isn’t . . . smooth. Often a lab builds exciting stuff but then is frustrated in bringing it to the broader organization for commercial use. . . .Classic management science dictates that stable, repeatable processes keep companies in business. Innovation, by definition, disturbs equilibrium, threatening what has gone before. . . . “You are causing disruptions to a system that has an immune response to repair those disruptions.”

In other words, how do you get the “. . .[organizational] body not to reject the [new] organ.”

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" Thomas S. KhunA seminal work on how the scientific world initially rejects discoveries that challenge the prevailing wisdom is found in the 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn.

This brings me to the world of academia. Putting innovation aside for the moment, integration of innovation is both inevitable and resisted. On the inevitable side of the organizational equation, all academic institutions have already integrated a host of technological innovations, for example: touchtone telephones, teleconferencing, computing, the Internet, e-mail and mobile phones. Without these electronic technologies no academic institution of higher learning, at least, would exist today. As a result, “the invisible affect” is anyone at the bottom of the organization can communicate with anyone at the top of the organization. The role of organizational middle managers as messengers has virtually vanished—a trend that began in the 1980s that has resulted in the flattening of many organizations.

On the other hand, academic institutions are typically organized into groupings, that is, by academic discipline, otherwise known as departments. Yes, these departments are further grouped into larger groupings, such as arts and sciences, or business, or public affairs, but inherently academic organizations are separated into “silos,” to use the prevailing terminology. And what is the level of collaboration and cooperation among these departments? In my experience, very little. Breaking down the imaginary boundaries among departments is a very difficult endeavor.

So, on the one hand, electronic technologies have created a breakdown of hierarchy of sorts and allowed academics to communicate with others on a global scale 24/7. On the other hand, the typical organization of academic disciplines by subject inherently creates internal resistance to change.

If technological innovation is to occur on a broader basis, more colleges and universities need to create what has been initiated at Lehman College in the Bronx, New York.

Lehman College has been selected by the American Council on Education/Change Innovation Lab LogoAmerican Council on Education (ACE) to participate in the Change and Innovation Lab (CIL), a program to help colleges and universities implement significant and sustainable initiatives to increase the number of first-generation and nontraditional students who gain a college degree. Lehman is one of nine institutions that will work during the 18-month CIL project to implement concrete steps on their campuses and identify how some of these practices can be applied broadly at colleges and universities across the country. The project is supported by a $400,000 grant from Lumina Foundation.

Second, and this is really the difficult part, colleges and universities on the undergraduate level need to re-think how students take courses and earn a degree. Online learning aside, is the organization of academic subjects by department the best way to go, or is it just the way it has been always done, and why change?

In a way, the organizational status quo is the line of least resistance. In another way, take any subject, from anthropology to zoology, from accounting to English, and you should find that no subject is pure in content. For example, accounting is a lot about “debit left, credit right.” But it is not just about numbers. It is about analytical thinking, and communicating conclusions in an efficient and effective way to someone else or a group of someone elses in written and oral forms. In other words, in this one subject, it is not just about crunching numbers, it is also about conceptual thinking, and communicating. You can throw in “ethics” as well, given the history of the accounting business in the last 20-30 years.

The integration of innovation takes lots of timeExpectations of short-term results from organized innovation efforts, and integration of these innovations into the organizational structure need to be tempered by the long history of homo sapiens’ technological evolution. The reality is innovation, more often than not, happens by accident and there are always antecedents. And integration of these innovations always takes time, a lot of time.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
September 7, 2015

© Eugene Marlow 2015

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The Stagnation of Human Rights Freedoms, Media Ownership, and Concentration of Wealth

Marlowsphere Blog (#117)

Freedom House—an organization founded in 1941 by former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and attorney Wendell Willkie—has published its latest report on “Freedom in the World 2015.”  It is not a pretty picture.

Freedom House's "Freedom in World 2015" map

While the second half of the 20th century witnessed the growth of freedom in the world, in the late 20th century (starting in 1995) until now, human rights freedoms, country by country, has declined on a global basis. The kind view is that the growth of freedom has at least stagnated. To quote from the report:

More aggressive tactics by authoritarian regimes and an upsurge in terrorist attacks contributed to a disturbing decline in global freedom in 2014. Freedom in the World 2015 found an overall drop in freedom for the ninth consecutive year.

Nearly twice as many countries suffered declines as registered gains—61 to 33—and the number of countries with improvements hit its lowest point since the nine-year erosion began. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a rollback of democratic gains by Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s intensified campaign against press freedom and civil society, and further centralization of authority in China were evidence of a growing disdain for democratic standards that was found in nearly all regions of the world.

The worst regions of the world with respect to lack of freedom are Northern Africa and the Middle East.

The decline (or stagnation) in human rights freedoms reported by Freedom House parallels the ranking of world countries with respect to journalistic freedom of the press. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF) “World Press Freedom Index 2015″:

Two-thirds of the 180 countries surveyed for the 2015 World Press Freedom Index performed less well than in the previous year,” the France-based watchdog said. RSF attributed the decline largely to attacks on media as global conflicts proliferated throughout 2014. This includes not only repressive regimes, but also non-state groups such as Boko Haram and Islamic State, which “used fear and reprisals to silence journalists”.

Iran, China, Syria and North Korea were among the places ranked as having the worst levels of press freedom. China came in 176th, one step down from last year.

. . . .Around the world, France ranked 38th (up one place) the U.S. 49th (down three places) and Russia 152nd (down four).

Freedom of the Press World Wide 2014

This blog has already pointed to the issue of the relationship between lack of literacy (or to put it another way, levels of illiteracy) and violence. The general conclusion is that where there’s significant levels of illiteracy (such as in Pakistan), there’s significant levels of violence, especially against girls and women. Further, where’s there’s significant levels of illiteracy (such as in Egypt), there’s significant lack of human rights freedoms.

But there’s another relationship that bears mentioning, and that is the relationship among levels of human rights freedoms (or the lack thereof), media ownership, and distribution of wealth.

What is the relationship between Human Rights Freedoms, Media Consolidation & Wealth Concentration on a global basis?The question is this: is there a relationship—that has evolved over the last 30-35 years—among the very real stagnation of growth of human rights freedoms in the world, the very real consolidation of media ownership on a global basis, and the very real high levels of wealth concentration on a global basis?

To provide some detail, in the last 30-35 years corporate ownership of media assets—print and electronic—has shrunk from about 80 companies to a mere handful. Depending on one’s definition, the major players in the media ownership industry range from a mere six to (perhaps) 12. The major players are such companies as: Disney, Bertelsman, Sony, COMCAST, News Corp., Time-Warner, CBS, et al.

During this same time period, the rich have gotten richer, the poor have gotten poorer, and the middle class has stagnated. A recent report pointed out that 80 people in the world had as much combined wealth as 3 ½ billion people on the planet. With respect to the latter group, the reference is to the poorest people on planet Earth.

Granted, the 20th century has seen staggering rates of transportation, information, and communications technological innovation, literacy rates globally have risen significantly (according to UNESCO), healthcare has improved for more and more people globally, and in some parts of the world (China, for example, which is an irony), the middle class has grown dramatically, i.e., since Mao’s demise in 1976 several hundred million people have been brought out of poverty into the middle class.

Yet, in the same time period, the level of terrorism on a global scale has increased, fewer and fewer companies own more and more media assets, fewer and fewer people own more and more real and financial assets, and the growth of human rights freedoms has stagnated.

There was a time when the Internet was viewed as the technology that “would level the playing field for small vs. large companies.” To a degree this is true, but the fact of the matter is that large companies still own major portions of the playing field. The financial crisis of 2008-2009 in the United States—that had global repercussions—shuttered one major financial institution, Lehman Brothers, and a host of much smaller firms, not to mention the thousands of individuals who lost their homes; but the rest—those that were too big to fail—were saved by the tax payer!

It would be naïve to conclude that only financial institutions are the ones to point to for our current spate of global financial and geo-political problems. There are other reasons. One is the deeply imbedded clinging to outmoded beliefs and extreme religious concepts in certain parts of the world among certain communities. These communities are angered by the accelerating cultural changes brought on by technology and are reacting violently.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S.KhunAnother reason is the disruption of technology to cultural mores and norms in certain parts of the world. In general, people don’t like change. They want stability. Regardless, technological innovation brings about disruption to cultural mores and norms. In turn, external change challenges a culture’s world perspective. It’s hard to make the adjustment or give up perceptions that don’t work anymore. A good read on this subject is The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Khun.   The concepts in this book can be applied to the individual, the family, the larger community, and the country.

The question then becomes: does the inexorable march of technological innovation create  opportunities for a few to grab wealth and political power to the detriment of the rest of the populace? Is there, indeed, a close (perhaps, inevitable) relationship among the stagnation of growth of human rights freedoms, media consolidation, and wealth concentration among a few in the last 30-35 years?

It cannot be mere coincidence.

If you have any questions or comments about this or any other of my blogs, please write to me at meiienterprises@aol.com.

Eugene Marlow, Ph.D.
February 16, 2015

© Eugene Marlow 2015

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