Innovation Future Specialist

Innovation Newsletter: The Dark Side

The dark side of innovation: trick or treat

Innovation is great and it delivers fantastic benefits. However, in this edition we are mindful of the season: Halloween and Bonfire Night. So this explores the dark side of innovation.

The good, the bad and the ugly

Clint Eastwood of the film The good, the bad and the ugly In the innovation courses is a module that looks at the impact of innovation from the following perspectives: the good, the bad and the ugly. This opens your eyes to the power and impact of innovation. It takes a comprehensive look at its impact from various perspectives including the benefits, risks, winners, losers, and what the future may bring. This is important because you will become aware of how innovation can benefit, and protect, you and your organisation. It also provides inspiration for you to consider the sustainability of the products and services in your organisation, and its long term survival. It is hoped that graduates of the courses will innovate effectively and play nicely.

The three perspectives are described below.

» Good - This is where innovation is consciously used to deliver positive benefits. This is probably the most popular intention of organisations that pursue innovation.

» Bad - The intention to have a negative impact on a target group.

» Ugly - Sometimes things go wrong, or unexpected things happen, and this has a negative impact.

The aim is to encourage you to always focus on the good, avoid the bad, and prevent the ugly.

(In case you did not know, that is Clint Eastwood, star of the classic movie The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.)

Trick or treat?

The dark side of innovation: trick or treat
Your choice: Trick or Treat?

Trick

We might not want to dwell on this topic but it is important to be aware of the fact that sometimes, some people and organisations, deliberately use innovation to do bad things. The most blatant example of this has always been in warfare and weapons. Billions of dollars are spent every year on the development and procurement of new weapons. The world of business and commerce often borrows analogies from warfare and so, perhaps not surprisingly, businesses might use innovation to do "battle" with their competitors.

Rise of the Weapons and Warfare

Thousands of years ago we humans demonstrated our outstanding ability to make tools. This included our earliest forms of weapon, such as the club and the spear.

A few hundred years ago we invented machines and over the centuries machines have been used in warfare: tanks, ships, submarines, aeroplanes, chemical and biological weapons, bombs, and missiles. One of our most destructive machines to date is the hydrogen bomb, which is much more destructive than the atom bombs dropped on Japan in World War Two. There are enough nuclear warheads to destroy every major city on Earth.

New types of warfare are on the rise in this century and they include terrorism, cyber-warfare, and killer robots. All three of these represent a significant threat. For example, there is a high profile campaign to stop killer robots from autonomously carrying out their actions. Some robots are associated with military projects, and if left unchecked this could lead to a scenario similar to that of the Terminator films [images].

Valuable information in this context includes: knowing what the weapons capability and intention of a (potential) enemy is. From a national perspective, this information is collected by the intelligence services.

So what does this have to do with you? Hopefully, not a lot, unless you happen to be in an industry associated with some aspect above. However, some of these approaches do have analogies in business. These analogies are explored in the innovation course, but here you are urged to pause and think about how we should pursue innovation in the future. How do we avoid the (increasing) destruction of the human race? This is important because future technologies will be far more powerful and potentially far more destructive than what we have today.

Ugly Innovation

We have seen how innovation can be deliberately used for bad intentions, but sometimes innovation unexpectedly goes wrong or has an unforeseen negative impact. This is the ugly aspect to innovation.

For example, innovation has played a role in polluting the environment, at local and global scales:

» Pollution of the air you breathe, e.g. diesel vehicle emissions

» Emissions of toxins and cancer causing chemicals into air, land and water

» Pollution of rivers and aquifers with nitrates, phosphates, sewage and other chemicals

» Dumping toxic waste at sea, and its entry into the food chain

» Oil slicks at sea

» Potential contamination of food (pesticides)

» The hole in the ozone layer

» Rapid increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations (driving global warming)

» Plastic waste in urban areas, the countryside, on the beaches, and even in the middle of the oceans

» Leaks and disasters at nuclear power stations

» The problem of long-term nuclear waste

Innovation has a long and significant list of ugly impacts. Most of these were not foreseen at the time of the innovation.

There is a lesson to learn here: a greater effort should be invested in proactively anticipating what the ugly impact of an innovation might be; and proactively taking steps to ensure that ugly impact does not happen.

Treat

Here we present one example from the course that demonstrates some good benefits arising from innovation ...

Health and Wellbeing

Innovation has made enormous improvements in our health and wellbeing. For example: many devices and scanners to diagnose our health problems, DNA analysis, medicines to cure us, pain-killers and anaesthetics to subdue pain, operating theatres and modern surgical techniques, support for organ transplants, artificial limbs and joints, cosmetic surgery (facial reconstruction and face transplants), treatments to fight cancer (chemotherapy, radiotherapy/X-rays, gamma-knife, and proton-beam therapy).

Did you know? PET scanners use anti-matter!

This sector can expect to see an explosion in further innovations too. The following may be coming sooner than you think: stem cell therapies, growing replacement teeth, curing paralysis, growing replacement organs, nano-bots to cure disease, life-spans in excess of 120 years, and perhaps... head transplants!

Also, did you know?

» There is a factory where robots grow human body parts.

» Intelligent laboratory robots design and conduct their own experiments.

» Watson, the intelligent AI from IBM, is becoming a medical expert and will diagnose patients and advise doctors.

Within the second half of this century, it might even be possible to live forever [or a very long time]: as a human body; or by having your brain scanned and uploaded into a virtual world inside a super-computer. There are already, at least, two large research programmes to scan the human brain in amazing detail: recording the precise details of neurons and their synaptic connections.

The day I wrote this newsletter I received an alumni magazine from Nottingham University which describes their pioneering work on MRI scanners. This was lead by Sir Peter Mansfield [my physics tutor many years ago].

Here is an example of thinking ahead: I remember at the time it used to be called NMR, not MRI. That name was dropped, probably because Nuclear Magnetic Resonance did not sound safe in the mind of the public.

More good

There are some excellent examples of the benefits of innovation in the free course What is Innovation?

It only takes a few minutes to do and there is no registration required, just jump straight in.

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