This was on our minds when we started our work on the report.
If Chile winds up adopting policies based on assumptions that do not work, it will not succeed in its goal of improving its competitiveness.
This is why we stepped back to ask how innovations actually happen.
We produced the new interpretation you see in the report, and that allowed us to make policy
recommendations that are likely to help Chile.
And any other country as well.
Our new interpretation is that innovations emerge in history. Every innovation bears the imprint of its history and its era.
The more common notions of new ideas and adopted practices hide the historical emergence.
Unless you can see how historical emergence works, you cannot create policies that foster it.
Our examples of Pasteur and Edison point out that innovation is not simply a moment of insight, it is the product of the era (the times).
The ingredients of an innovation are a concern or problem for which a resolution would be valuable, a set of existing components (including technologies) that enable or constrain
possible resolutions, and a proposal for a particular combination of components (a design). Pasteur’s concern was to protect people against rabies; existing components included methods for
producing animal vaccines, expertise in chemistry, expertise in microscopy, and a validated theory of germs; the proposal was a rabies vaccine.
These three elements are all highly depen-dent on the historical moment.
Many of the needed components did not exist years before.
The rabies vaccine proposal would seem routine years later.
Pasteur’s genius included a critical skill we call “surfing history.”
He was a master at chemistry and had unusual insights about connections between disease, germs, and life science.
But his ability to bring all that into the service of mankind flowed not from his scientific genius, but from his surfing mastery.