Innovation is the habit, or the knack, or finding new premises. It is problem questing rather than problem solving. Our best schools and universities hone problem solvers of a certain kind. Give the finest graduates of these places a problem with well-defined premises and they are awesomely efficient at finding a solution that fits the premises. In fact, their education is largely a matter of fitting their brains out with a list of acceptable premises. They are clever twits. Historically universities have been holding pens for clever twits, but the high paying habitats of corporations and government departments have attracted them in increasing numbers. Witness Wall Street’s financial whiz kids for a recent consequence. Most human problems have long been familiar, especially the social and economic kind. That is, their premises have been defined, typically by culture and tradition. In each culture, the local clever twits enforce their solutions based on accepted premises. Yet the human social and technical matrix, mixing and whirling ever faster, also crashes repeatedly. Injustice is rife, incompetence endemic, happiness elusive. When things fail utterly, the clever twits in desperation seize, in the most amateurish way, upon any stray proposition thrown into the ring, In such unstable environments the clever twits frequently have neither a moral compass, nor a skeptic’s trained eye, nor the eccentric habits of innovators who can cast old premises through a new prism, and find the hidden catalyst in an unsuspected premise, the key to unlock those old problems that we thought we knew so well.
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