Technological Innovation in Legacy Sectors by William B. Bonvillian

Author:William B. Bonvillian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-07-14T14:30:00+00:00

The Change Agent

Whatever the model, innovation doesn’t just happen. Even if the elements for an innovation system are assembled, someone or something must serve as the catalyst for change. We call that person or organization the change agent. Change agents, like innovation itself, must operate at both the institutional and the personal, face-to-face level. And as usual in human affairs, there is no substitute for leadership.

We explored the concept of change agent in the defense sector in chapter 8, focusing on the role of leaders in the secretary of defense’s office allied to an innovation agency, in that case DARPA. The change agent, whether an institution or an individual allied to an institution, must be a policy orchestrator, pulling threads of policy options together to effect change and drive the innovation. The agent, therefore, must have available “inducible” or at least potential technological innovations, the policy instruments to push them, and the ability to identify, access, combine, and deploy both the innovations and the complementary policy instruments needed to exploit them.

The change agent takes a different form depending on which kind of model the innovation process is following. In the pipeline model, as we have seen, there is a major institutional gap between basic research organizations, which pursue discovery, and industry, which pursues the later stages of implementation. There are few bridges across this gap;21 the key job of the change agent is to find one. In this case, the change agent is likely to be industry, particularly a small firm or entrepreneur prepared to pursue a radical innovation from research to a commercial product, sometimes with the aid of a technology transfer office in a university or government laboratory. As an example, many early software advances were supported by federal research. The critical computer language for what became desktop computing, which was both simpler to program with but able to reach sophisticated levels, was BASIC, developed by Dartmouth researchers from an NSF grant. But it took Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and their Microsoft “Microkids” team to apply BASIC to early microcomputers, from the earliest Altair through the IBM PC, making Microsoft’s application of BASIC (and the MS-DOS operating system that used it) effectively the industry standard.22

The induced innovation model is inherently less ambitious and more connected. Here the change agent is industry. A firm sees a market opportunity, typically for an incremental or secondary technological advance, and moves to meet it. This is the story, for example, of Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner. While jet aircraft were nurtured and sustained for decades by the military, the 787 applied a series of incremental advances to reduce weight, improve performance, and cut fuel consumption so as to fill a market need of the commercial airlines.

The manufacturing-led innovation model is exemplified by Japan’s adoption of its famous quality manufacturing paradigm in the 1970s and 1980s based on ideas by Edward Demming. Japan’s industrial leadership cadre were the change agents. Demming’s principles were implemented most famously in the “Toyota system,” which led to a production

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