The evolution of ideas

Sustainable innovation requires radical ideas, says Utrecht University’s innovation scientist Koen Frenken, who has been awarded a €1.5 million grant by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for research into the origins of revolutionary innovations. ‘I want to find out whether people with non-standard backgrounds are more likely to create scientific, technological and cultural breakthroughs.’

Every idea has a family tree

Every innovative idea is an amalgamation of the ‘pedigrees’ of various ideas. The more varied the ideas combined into something new are, the more chance of radical innovation, Professor Frenken thinks. He believes his ‘ideas-evolution’ concept can be applied in a wide range of fields, including music, art, business and science.

‘I suspect that the most radical innovations come from people or teams with atypical careers, from people who have held many different jobs,’ Frenken says. He compares that mixture of inspirations with a family tree, in which knowledge, instead of DNA, is transmitted. ‘Such people often aren’t the best in their discipline, but they’re creative and build up a bastion of knowledge that enables them to see links where others can’t. That may seem self-evident, but it has never before been systematically studied.’

By tracing the origins of radical innovations, Frenken is planning to analyse three types of family trees: those of mentors and their pupils, of old technologies that get recycled into new technologies, and of references in publications.

Innovations in different places

Frenken also suspects that the places where the most creative people get their ideas from are frequently not the same places as where the innovations break through. ‘Before I started working at the Copernicus Institute as an innovation scientist, I worked at the Human Geography department for eight years,’ he says. ‘I was already researching the geography of scientific knowledge there. Where is scientific knowledge created, and why specifically there? I can now integrate these studies into my current research to try to understand why the place where a creative idea is hatched is very often not where it comes to fruition.’

Frenken gives cultural innovation as an example. ‘Every region has its own specialities. In the Netherlands, many culturally innovative artists come from the province of North Brabant, but don’t break through until they move to Amsterdam. People may be very creative, but they need intermediaries who can make their creations socially acceptable and sell them to a wide audience. The same applies in science. Breakthroughs occur in many different places all over the world, but scientists with revolutionary ideas often then move to renowned universities such as Cambridge or Harvard. That in turn perpetuates the geographical differences.’

MyWheels and Snappcar

One of the radical innovations which Frenken is passionately studying is car-sharing. ‘That’s a good example of sustainable innovation,’ he says. ‘Ten years ago, no-one in his right mind would’ve considered letting a complete stranger borrow his car. That way of thinking is probably a relic from the last century, when cars were much more of a status symbol than they are now. The initial reaction to the idea of renting your private car to strangers was, therefore, ‘That’ll never work’. Now we have rapidly growing platforms like MyWheels and Snappcar, which prove the exact opposite. I’m studying how these types of initiatives have managed to catch on, despite existing institutions’ resistance.’

Degree of radicalness

‘Whether an innovation is radical is something you can only really judge in retrospect,’ Frenken continues. ‘When you’re in the middle of a process, you often don’t realise you’re a pioneer because, for the person concerned, it’s a step-by-step process. But occasionally people realise they are working on something completely innovative, like the Uber founders, or the NASA team that put men on the moon. Radical innovation can also be planned.’

‘Obviously, nothing is completely new,’ Frenken concludes. ‘Philosophically, that’s virtually impossible. It’s often an innovation’s conceptual aspect that is the real breakthrough, and whether you can explain your innovation to the masses. A typical new aspect was, for instance, the idea of ‘Let’s all give up our cars and rent one only if we really need it’. That dot on the horizon has now resulted in an entirely new line of business. We all want a more sustainable society, but things will have to change radically if we are to make it happen. I want to find out how these changes arise so that we can smooth the path towards them.’

Institutions

This research project is part of Utrecht University's strategic theme Institutions. This area of research explores the manner in which societies derive their strength and resilience from the quality of their rules on human interaction, as embodied in institutions.