The Successful Exploitation of New Ideas

April 28th, 2008

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Risk-taking and innovation. They’re right there at the centre of everything that makes our way of life so goddamn unbeatable. They foster the efficient allocation of resources, spur technological development that improves our everyday lives, and generally result in lots more toys for us to play with.

The toys and the distraction of playing with them are a particularly valuable benefit, especially given what happens when risks get “taken”. Taking large financial risks is generally a luxury that comes with economic power, as adding to the vast uncertainties with which human lives are hedged about is not something most people feel inclined to do. Further, if risks are “taken”, this generally means they don’t just get picked up, they get carried around for a while before before being dropped somewhere else, with the aid of a variety of implements. Take, for example, the complex investment instruments used by corporations. These spread risk so far around the network of global financial institutions that by the time the ruinous effects of bad guesses reverberate back through the wires to you, you’ve probably had time to offset them with another round of spread betting. Unfortunate for all those who happen to hold rather marginal mortgages, work in industry, or depend on next year’s food crop, but them’s the breaks.

Alternatively, you can simply cut the costs of innovation as far as possible by letting someone else pick up the tab somewhere downstream by living with your pollution, unexpected side-effects of undertested pharmaceuticals, or whatever. Even better, you could make sure that the main bearer of your risks is nature, in which case maybe you’ll get to hang on to the profit margins for a bit longer until the message comes back from the network telling you you’ve gone too far, and you suddenly find yourself needing to build the costs of terraforming another planet into your forecasts for next year.

But as a risk-taker, you of course recognise that with great power comes great responsibility. Which means that you feel obligated to soberly weigh up the benefits of your new product, or rather, what your marketing department imagines people might potentially believe are its benefits (based only on 30 seconds of sexualised imagery poking away at their insecurities), against all those complicated internal and external costs that are so hard to guess at.

All this needs to be done before you decide whether you should demiurgically depress the big red button marked “Innovate!”, and settle back to watching the Wheels of Creation start to turn. Who knows what new wonders will spring forth to exalt the dignity and boundless imagination of humanity?

And that’s how we just ended up with another nine brands of toothpaste on the market, only this time they contain largely untested free nanoparticles.