One of the most attractive, powerful, and hard to imitate attributes of the United States is its culture of innovation. The United States generates a lot of new ideas, inventions, and new processes. Innovation appears in all aspects of society: engineering, yes, but also education, political organizing, the arts, and even spirituality. Many countries create new religions, but I have a hard time of finding one where so many of them are successful and survive as long as the ones started in the U.S.
And while the U.S. has a strong culture of innovation, U.S. business doesn't. On the contrary, U.S. business has a culture of inertia, imitation, and mediocrity. It resists innovation. It is fashion driven: people keep track of what is popular, and then they adopt it so that they can be part of the cool kids' clique.
Some of you may be shaking their heads in disbelief. We in the U.S. have heard the narrative about how competition and business leadership leads to innovation. This has been said for more than a century. But instead of listening to what U.S. businesses says, let's pay attention to what they do. Let's review how U.S. innovators create and what business leaders do with these creations.
The U.S. nurtures innovation in a number of ways. It has as a cultural hero the wacky inventor. It tolerates eccentricity if there are results. Tinkering is encouraged, especially if one can create a new tool or improve an existing one. Scientific American started as a magazine that shared new inventions. It was consumed for entertainment. Figures like Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla, Alexander Graham Bell are cultural heroes to this day. This is remarkable for a country that is focused on the present and future, often ignoring its own past, good or bad. Benjamin Franklin was heavily involved in the creation of the U.S. as a nation, yet he is often most remembered for his inventions and scientific experiments.
The U.S. has a history of embracing technology to see what we can do with it. We are familiar with our recent history of people adopting cell phones, personal computers, and the internet. We can find this embrace of technology from the early days of the nation. The US still has a community of ham radio enthusiasts, many who built their own radios. Do It Yourself has a market for itself, with big companies like Home Depot providing tools and materials for people to build on their own.
And it is not only technology. We also have seen a lot of cultural innovation. The world consumes and emulates Hollywood-style movies. For generations, people around the world have learned to play jazz, rock, and hip hop. They read U.S. styled comic books, put on U.S. musicals, and go to U.S. styled standup comedy. There wouldn't be manga without U.S. comics. There wouldn't be Mexican Lucha Libre without U.S. professional wrestling.
It goes beyond engineering and the arts. We have people like Gene Sharp, who is a renown strategic non-violence theorist. His strategies have been successfully used to nonviolently take down dictatorship around the world. Murray Bookchin, a social theorist, outlined methods of direct democracy that have been put in place in Kurdistan and Catalunya. Deming created a process for creating high quality in industrial production. This process is largely credited with bringing Japan from postwar destruction to becoming a leading economic power. You probably haven't heard of these people. They are better known outside the United States.
Some would dismiss the appeal of U.S. culture as a product of propaganda and cultural imperialism. And there is some element of truth in that. The U.S. did spend a lot of money during the Cold War to make sure that people around the world would learn about U.S. culture through the Reader's Digest and Disney movies on the one hand, and abstract expressionists and avant-garde music on the other. But even acknowledging that, the consumption and adoption wouldn't have worked if it wasn't appealing. U.S. culture is attractive to people around the world.
Take hip hop, for example. Hip hop is perhaps the most successfully adopted music genre. You can find people doing French hip hop, Loatian hip hop, indigenous Bolivian hip hop. Unlike rock music, there aren't big record companies sponsoring it. Hip hop starts spreading to the rest of the world when the Cold War propaganda money ends. Yet the simplicity of the genre and its encouragement to speak up invites people to try it. People all over the world make loops and rap over them about love, injustice, existential angst, humor.
In short, the U.S. has a long history of nurturing, encouraging, and celebrating all kinds of innovations.This is part of U.S. culture. If we can talk about a national character, tinkering, improving, creating new tools to make life easier, creating new art forms to express ourselves, is part of the U.S. character.
It is surprising, then, when we find that historically, U.S. business dislikes innovation. At best, it doesn't know what to do with it. At worst, it will use its power and influence to destroy it. Business distrust innovation because it can be an existential threat. To make matters worse, it is unclear what innovation is actually a threat; we only know which ones were significant after the fact. So, although the vast majority of innovations die on the vine, every single one of them could destroy their company.
It makes sense that business is against innovation, especially leading companies in a market. Let's look at big oil. Exxon, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell control the supply of oil in the US. They provide the fuel that transport us, creates our electricity, and runs many of our industrial machines. This control gives them a lot of money, and with that money, power. Not abstract power, but real power. Big oil can dictate national foreign policy, including which countries the U.S. should invade. In fact, they have enjoyed this power for over 100 years. Alternative energy sources are a threat, which they historically have been successful at eliminating, or, when that wasn't possible, restricting. It is then more outrageous if some employees at Exxon create a practical, decentralized alternative energy. This hypothetical innovation could, at best, diminish their money and power, and at worst, destroy the company and the oil industry as we know.
Let's leave hypothetical examples and review history. Let's review the famous Kodak case. Kodak was a world leader in the photograph market. They sold cameras, photographic paper, photographic chemicals, but most importantly, rolls of film. This was the source of their profits. If families wanted to preserve memories, most people, at some point paid them money for that service, first for the film, and then for the development. Kodak engineers in the 90s create the electronic camera, one that didn't use film. Kodak famously buried this project, their leadership probably unhappy that they had spent money on a product that would kill their profits. Where they wrong? No. Other companies did sell electronic cameras, people adopted them, and the sales of film went down, destroying Kodak. Today Kodak is mostly a memory among older people. We have adults today who don't really know about this company at all.
But what about the narratives about innovation? Well, that is propaganda.
Business propaganda claims that business and capitalism drives innovation. Markets are this open competition where anyone with a good idea can start a company and disrupt existing markets. Look at iWidgit, the fictional, ubiquitous, successful company. The founder had a great idea, which was rejected by many people. So he and his best buddy started working in a garage and started the iWidgets revolution, disrupting the Big Widget market. Remember Widgetron? Yeah, iWidgit took them down.
Here is beautiful version of it. In 1984 Apple famously created the 1984 ad for the Macintosh computer. Big brother is on a big screen, watched by gray drones in rows. A young athletic woman runs and throws a hammer at the screen, smashing it into pieces.
We can quickly notice how there is a strange use of revolutionary language. We have a great vision, a distrustful establishment, a small guerrilla that pushes forward, armed with a great innovation. They succeed, disrupting the existing order, making the world a better place.
Frankly, if one is bootstrapping a company, this narrative is inspiring and attractive. It may be necessary to be able to push forward when the odds are against you. But does it make sense to see the CEO of Meta talk like this? Microsoft? Uber, with an investor fund that is much greater than municipal taxi companies? The leading companies in an economic sector are the establishment. Why would they want to embrace a narrative than can bring them down?
U.S. business embraces the language and narrative of innovation, and revolution, because it fears it. Big business can control markets, regulatory agencies, lawmakers, and judges. It can't control innovation, because the U.S. citizens can't stop innovating. It is too grassroots. It happens everywhere. You see it universities; you find it in garages; in community workshops; even worse, in U.S. corporations, right under their noses.
So they behave like Zeus did in the ancient Greek religion. Zeus becomes the ruler of gods when he kills his father, Uranus. And then Zeus actively searches for the god destined to kill him and replace him. He learns from Prometheus that the son of Tethys is fated to be that god. So Zeus arranges for Tethys to marry a mortal, giving birth to Achilles, a mortal, thus avoiding the cycle of the child of a god destroying the current ruler. Zeus will be ruler forever.
The goal is to do the same with innovation. If you can find it and kill it, then you will be safe; you will keep your market power forever. Facebook is a prime example. It has tried to identify and kill innovation wherever it can. Instagram is popular with teenagers? They buy it. Whatsapp is growing in popularity? They buy it. Snapchat becomes popular? They try to buy it. Since Snapchat decline the offer, they try to destroy them by using their market power to run them out of business. TikTok becomes popular, with a stream of content that people love? Since they can't buy them, they use their money to try to legislate them out of the U.S. market.
Listen to Facebook tell this story, though. They will describe it as a series of mergers to bring those innovations into Facebook, so the revolutionary humanitarian company could share them with more people. Copying Snapchat features shows the agility that Facebook has at adopting new trends. Facebook cares about the mental health of teenagers, so that is why they are pushing for laws that protect teens. That the same laws go after their current and future competitions is a coincidence.
Facebook copying Snapchat features illustrates another U.S. business behavior. They will copy what they perceive to be successful from each other until we reach an equilibrium where everything is more or less the same. Most U.S. cars looked more or less the same and had the same low gas efficiency when Detroit dominated the car industry. Most comic books in the U.S. are superhero comic books because that genre became very successful at some point. Popular beer in the 1980s tasted more or less the same. Offering more or less the same product reduces competition and the need for innovation. The big players can find a market segment that their publicity appeals to, and then live in relative peace.
The U.S. keeps innovating, with business support or not. This excess innovation creates these business and technological opportunities that are lying around waiting for someone to come along and use them. They can be U.S. people seizing it; sometimes they are people from other countries.
Japan adopted Deming's philosophy for quality control, ideas that were rejected in the U.S. Using these ideas, they quickly went from a country that made cheap trinkets to compete against U.S. companies with cameras, cars, and electronics. It took Detroit almost 20 years to catch up with the quality of Japanese cars. Some can argue that they have given up on the sedan market to focus on minivans, SUVs, and trucks.
Another famous example is how Steve Jobs looks at the graphical user interface (GUI) Xerox Alto and then ran back to create the Macintosh. DOS dominated the market, but Bill Gates understood that he had to create something comparable. It took Microsoft a long time to catch up.
If one is ready to take advantage of these innovations, where should we look for them?
One place to look for is in history. There are many great ideas that were tried and then discarded, for one reason or another, in the past. If one starts reviewing them, one can find one great idea after another. Some of these lie completely dormant, in articles or journal papers. Some of them have small communities of practitioners and hobbyist who enjoy the technology and create a community around it. To properly judge the innovations, we need to know about the field, of course. We also need to remember that a lot of successful technologies are successful for what ends up being random reasons. Keeping an open mind helps.
Sometimes the old technology or technique may not work today. But the key concept can be adapted. No one would expect us to use again a Commodore 64 as our main computer. Yet some elements of the experience, like the quick startup, the direct empowerment of the user, and the quick response can be something that we can adopt today in web applications.
Another place to look for innovation is academia. The U.S. has created so many great ideas that have been described and even prototypes built for many technologies. A lot of them are in journal papers. Here one will have to have an inclination to read journal papers, which is a skill that does require some training to do, but it is doable.
If the two previous bookish strategies do not appeal to one, one can go to makerspaces. You will find local communities of makers who are building interesting machines, developing techniques, teaching each other practices. You will also have enthusiastic practitioners who will be happy to share what they have come up with.
Remember to keep an open mind. Innovation is messy. There are a lot of failed experiments. There are a lot of tools or inventions that don't do things well or ever did. The mistake can always be the soil for some other idea that works. It is a matter of exploring and trying things out.