This piece was commissioned for Tsinghua University’s internal circle; the subtitle was a suggested theme, and the main title was chosen by me. At the time of publication, it was somewhat abridged (mainly with a few examples cut, which did not affect the overall argument), and some sentences were marked with emphasis, which I have restored here.
These days we advocate “mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation,” and “innovation” seems to be everywhere; everyone admires innovation and pursues innovation.
Whether at the level of the nation or at the level of industries and enterprises, “innovation” is indeed extremely important and certainly deserves everyone’s attention. But precisely for that reason, we need to examine the meaning of the concept of “innovation” more carefully, so as to avoid letting “innovation” degenerate into a slogan and become a “label” used to flatter or attack one another.
We might as well discuss the concept of “innovation” from an academic standpoint. The so-called academic standpoint, unlike propaganda or entertainment, does not seek to produce a simple, final verdict, but instead approaches questions with an exploratory and disputatious attitude.
The first thing to avoid is simply equating “innovation” with a “good thing.”
A “good thing” does not necessarily have to be innovation. Lei Feng helping an elderly woman cross the street is certainly doing a good deed, but it does not require him to reinvent the wheel or come up with an original, unprecedented way of helping her. Bethune came to China to save lives and treat the wounded; of course that was a good thing, and it would have been perfectly fine for him to practice medicine with outdated equipment in an ordinary, conventional way—no one required him to carry out some new invention on the injured. Archaeologists restoring ancient artifacts so that they can shine again also do not need to deliberately add any new gimmicks.
“Innovation” is also not necessarily a good thing. For example, the Nazis created gas chambers unprecedented in history and carried out mass killings with astonishing efficiency; such a novel creation was of course evil. Unit 731 conducted human experiments and discovered many new scientific findings about the human body; these new discoveries were of course not good things either.
In short, we may understand what “innovation” means from various angles, but we need not sanctify or absolutize it—just as we should avoid declaring that if something “is not innovation,” it must necessarily be an insult or a put-down, or that if a person does not innovate, then he must be lacking in ambition. Such an attitude should be avoided. Likewise, when we discuss how to incentivize innovation and promote innovation, we should also note that these measures cannot solve every problem; institutional and cultural environments do not have only one dimension, namely the promotion of innovation. For example, we can clearly incentivize innovation by safeguarding innovators’ reputation and interests (through various reward systems and patent systems), but an environment that encourages people to “vie for fame and compete for profit” is only aimed at this one dimension of innovation; it does not mean that this mode of incentives should be set up as the sole or highest value of the whole society.
When we examine “innovation” in its historical context, we need to pay even more attention to this point. We find that “innovation” in the modern sense came along with Western capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. We notice that many of capitalism’s institutional designs and cultural ideas can indeed incentivize innovation, but we cannot say that because they can incentivize innovation, they are therefore necessarily good things. This article attempts to examine the meaning of “innovation” and its historical transformations from the perspective of the history of science and technology, but it does not attempt to take a position for or against the environments related to incentivizing innovation; those questions still await further discussion in philosophy, ethics, or political science.
It cannot be denied that in today’s cultural environment, the word “innovation” is indeed often associated with “good things,” and this association itself is very modern. This is not to say that ancient people necessarily rejected innovation, but they would not treat innovation as something all that important. When Copernicus proposed heliocentrism, he repeatedly stressed that his theory was not new, since someone had already proposed it in ancient Greece. Copernicus even believed that the greatest error of Ptolemaic astronomy was that it departed from Plato’s intent, whereas his own work was rather a return to that intent.
It was not until Newton that, on the one hand, he already had a strong sense of competing for “priority,” while on the other hand he also believed that many truths had long been known to the ancients; thus he devoted himself to deciphering biblical codes in an effort to unearth hidden ancient wisdom.
After Newton, it was only with the “Enlightenment” that the rejection of the “old” and the veneration of the “new” truly took root. People rushed to champion and spread the “new science,” but these new ideas had not yet directly affected society. It was not until after the Industrial Revolution that “innovation” became linked with the development and progress of society as a whole.
The importance of the Industrial Revolution lies not only in the development of productive forces driven by the spread of a few new technologies (the steam engine or the spinning machine), but more crucially in the fact that it gave rise to a new mode of “innovation”. Countless inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs all began consciously to promote “innovation,” thus setting in motion the industrial age of “mass innovation.”
There were new things in antiquity too, but the creation and diffusion of new technologies depended more on chance. People very rarely consciously promoted the research, development, and spread of new technologies, and there were no specialized institutions or methods for incentivizing invention.
In the seventeenth century, England’s patent law gradually matured. In 1690, Locke proposed the concept of “intellectual property,” and protection for innovators gradually took root in people’s minds. The first practical steam machine, Savery’s “Miner’s Friend,” happened to obtain a patent in 1690; in the early eighteenth century, Newcomen improved it (paying Savery patent fees for a long time), adding a piston and connecting rod so that the steam pump could provide mechanical power. Before Watt, Newcomen steam engines and Savery steam pumps had already been used in mines for more than half a century.
Watt’s key contribution was adding a separate condenser to the Newcomen steam engine, thereby greatly improving its efficiency. Clearly, what Watt did was an improvement from 1 to 2, not a creation from 0 to 1. The familiar story of little Watt looking at a kettle and coming up with the idea is not credible; Watt did not draw inspiration directly from nature, but instead refined existing technology in the details.
But precisely for that reason, Watt became so fittingly a representative figure of the Industrial Revolution. For Watt not only improved the steam engine, he improved “improvement” itself.
Ancient craftsmen were often born into poverty, lacked education, had small social circles, and tended to shut themselves away, relying on inherited master skills to tinker in isolation. Watt, however, though born into a craftsman’s family (in shipbuilding), grew up in relatively comfortable circumstances and received a good cultural education from childhood. Later he entered the University of Glasgow, where, in his capacity as an instrument repairman, he interacted widely with many professors and students, thereby gaining access to knowledge related to the steam engine. He was most enthusiastic about chemical research. Although his dealings with the chemistry professor Black did not directly provide guidance for improving the steam engine, they very likely broadened Watt’s horizons and inspired him to focus his thinking on phenomena related to steam condensation.
The famous economist Adam Smith was also one of Watt’s introducers. Perhaps Watt did not learn economics directly from him, but an awareness of “the economy” did indeed guide Watt’s work. Ancient craftsmen often paid more attention to qualitatively achieving “function,” whereas Watt approached things from the ratio of costs to profits and focused on “efficiency.” The earliest version of Watt’s steam engine was functionally no different from Newcomen’s steam engine; the improvement lay entirely in efficiency. In commemoration of Watt, the unit of power in modern physics was named the “watt,” which precisely reflects Watt’s most crucial “innovative” contribution.
The shift from qualitative thinking to quantitative thinking meant that, after Watt, craftsmen no longer merely groped and probed blindly, but consciously guided inventive activity on the basis of quantitative experiments and economic evaluation.
After the Industrial Revolution, Edison went a step further and brought “industry” itself into inventive activity. Edison founded one of the earliest industrial laboratories, the Menlo Park Laboratory. He broke research and development work down into separate parts, just like a production line, so that each R&D worker could focus on a small, specific task right in front of them. Some people specialized in studying the shape of the filament, some in collecting materials for the filament, some in improving the airtightness of the light bulb, and some in logistics and supervision… Many people emphasize how many experiments Edison conducted to find a durable filament, wanting only to highlight how diligent he was, but the more crucial point is that through this new institution of the industrial laboratory, Edison made it possible for the “sweat of 99 people” to effectively revolve around one person’s “inspiration.” All inventions from the industrial laboratory were applied for as patents under Edison’s name, and thus Edison eventually held more than a thousand patents. This does not merely show his diligence, nor does it mean that he stole others’ diligence; the key lies in the fact that he changed the mode of “innovation” itself. Edison’s “industrial laboratory” was soon emulated by other enterprises; by the twentieth century, industrial laboratories had become standard equipment for large corporations and the most important source of innovation outside universities and academies of science.
From Watt to Edison, the mode and meaning of “innovation” were constantly evolving, coupled with the market economy of the industrial age. The concept of efficiency (economic benefit) guided innovative activity, and conversely, the results of innovation also did in fact generate enormous economic benefits. Aside from Watt and Edison, those famous modern Western “inventors” all had similar characteristics. For example, Fulton (the steamboat), Stephenson (the train), Morse (the telegraph), Marconi (radio), the Wright brothers (the airplane), and so on—they were not the first people to take the relevant technologies from 0 to 1, but they were all the most successful in terms of commercialization, or rather economic benefit.
Technological innovation pursues economic benefit not merely because inventors pursue wealth, but because this is embedded in the very nature of modern innovative activity. In terms of technology itself, economic benefit means the direction of quantitative improvement; in terms of technology’s social benefit, economic benefit means the role it ultimately plays in enhancing productive forces. When we say that science and technology are the primary productive force, and innovation is the primary driving force, the crucial point lies precisely in the coupling between modern innovation and the modern economy.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Austrian economist Schumpeter systematically proposed the “theory of innovation,” treating technological innovation as the core link in economic development. Many of Schumpeter’s specific economic claims are of course highly controversial, but regarding innovation first and foremost as an economic question has become a consensus among many Western scholars.
In China, out of an instinctive aversion to “seeking profit,” people often consciously or unconsciously avoid the economic dimension when discussing the problem of “innovation”. We even tend to treat innovation more as a moral issue, always emphasizing the inventor’s valuable qualities such as acuity, hard work, seriousness, and perseverance, while often shying away from mentioning its economic dimension, such as the sense of efficiency during invention and marketing after invention. To understand the mode and meaning of innovation in this way is bound to be somewhat one-sided.
Of course, when we pay attention to the economics of innovation, it does not mean simply transplanting Western economics wholesale. We should of course have our own standpoint and rethink the issue of innovation within China’s cultural environment and economic system. But the prerequisite is that we cannot be coy about “seeking profit,” nor can we avoid the economic implications of the innovation question.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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