How to stifle innovation

For big commercial organisations, innovation is a requirement and a threat. Innovation is essential because it provides a means of developing products that are more attractive to their consumers than those of rival firms, or at least can be produced at lower cost. A reputation can also be useful in marketing: Apple can announce some re-design of an existing device, cunningly presented to resemble our idea of the modern (sleek, smooth, and shiny). But innovation is also destructive: old product lines are closed and their workers displaced. Whole companies disappear, and the towns that depended on them decline and empty. Few universities have closed, but departments, courses and research teams have. Scientific reputations have been lost, and well-established theories ridiculed and discredited.

There will therefore always be resistance to innovation, and this will be most successful when rival organisations can either be eradicated or (for the time being) ignored. There are several ways to stifle innovation. One is to reward conformity, and promote people regarded as being ‘a safe pair of hands’. By contrast, innovative people should be identified and excluded from promotion or, in more authoritarian societies, from life itself. But heretics are persistent, and other means of stifling their ideas are needed. One that is particularly successful is to regulate every aspect of organisational life in detailed procedures manuals, quality assurance rituals, and the kind of job descriptions that  comprise series of bullet-point lists. This method essentially outlaws the kind of local innovation that generates change in organisations and societies. Instead, things can only change when everyone changes. The organisation thereby innovates at the pace of the slowest or, more likely, not at all. The final means of stifling innovation is to generate a culture of smug superiority: this usually involves asserting that potential rivals are inferior without bothering to find out if this is the case. After all, why go through all the fuss and disturbance of innovation when you are already the best there is.

These techniques succeeded in resisting innovation for centuries in the great empires of the past. Egypt, Rome and the later Chinese Empire were technically stagnant, believing themselves to be protected by legions, deserts, seas and great walls from the threat of rivals. These rivals were weaker and more disorderly, and hence less willing to resist innovation. The Roman Empire was eventually destroyed by tribes which had learnt how to use stirrups and hence could ride heavy cavalry horses. The small European states, locked in perpetual warfare with each other, refined the gunpowder technology invented by the Chinese to bring about the destruction of the vast and populous Chinese Empire. 

Not just empires lie in ruins. Every day I travel to work, my train passes a large cleared space at Longbridge in Birmingham, where there was once the largest car factory in Europe. On the other side of the City, there once stood the largest motor bike factory in the world. Further North are the remains of yards which a century ago built half the world’s shipping. These empty spaces and ruins are all the products of organisations which successfully resisted innovation. How I wish they had failed to do so.