Teaching Old History to Promote New Innovation: Part I

Vol. 41, No. 2, April 2012
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by Brett Steele

This is the first installment of a two-part series in which the author describes opportunities for historians of science outside of academia. Part one highlights the sophisticated strategic reasoning that education in the history of science can impart. The second section, to be published in the July 2012 Newsletter, will discuss how this type of preparation can help those who are seeking careers in marketing, sales, or advertising, especially in high-tech domains.

What follows are my reflections on the practical—yet largely unrecognized—utility of using the history of science and technology to educate undergraduate science and engineering students. After completing my Ph.D. in the University of Minnesota's Program for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, I secured a postdoctoral lectureship at UCLA's Department of History. There, I taught courses in history of science and technology, as well as a strategy and ethics course for the School of Engineering. After finally conceding to the lack of academic demand for my research program (to reveal the symbiotic relationships between science and warfare through the Napoleonic Wars), I accepted a research position at the RAND Corporation in 2000. I have since been conducting research in, as well as teaching graduate courses on, security and business strategy in Santa Monica, California and Washington, DC. In the process, I have immersed myself in the academic aspects of business and in international relations and security studies. Now, looking back, I am struck by how the history of science and technology can offer a remarkably effective way for undergraduate science and engineering students to appreciate the managerial, competitive, and "strategic" dimensions of innovation in their future professions. This is especially critical in the twenty-first century, when these students will face global competition in graduate research programs and in commercial enterprises.

All innovators must make fundamental choices about the cost and performance of their output. They must also decide how much to invest in innovation through invention, analysis and development, and how much to spend to stimulate market demand. Yet where are undergraduates exposed to the approaches successful innovators use to make such decisions? Scientific innovators must always decide whether to move against competitors with more defensive actions and hold on to existing levels of influence, or to take more offensive actions against competitors to secure new advantages. Yet who exposes science and engineering students to the benefits and costs of such choices? In short, who ensures that science-oriented undergraduates are exposed to the strategic dimensions of innovation that will make these students more globally competitive throughout their careers?

Professors in the history of science and technology could offer the most efficient and effective means for satisfying such a need. Just think about how strategic naiveté could be minimized by enlightening undergraduate science and engineering students about the battles of annihilation between Newton and Leibniz or Boyle and Hobbes, the literary strategies Galileo used against his critics and skeptics, the Sun-Tzu-style manipulation of perception that Watson and Crick used to secure credit in discovering DNA, or the Machiavellian marketing campaign that Edison waged against Tesla. Many university presidents assume that business-school professors and economists are best suited for such a task. A closer look reveals, however, that these academics focus on a relatively narrow range of commercial issues. As far as most economics and business departments are concerned, the strategies of basic research and the political maneuvers of scientists are scarcely worth considering. Compare that focus to the scope of the history of science and technology: a broad spectrum of innovation in educational, industrial, military, political, and medical organizations throughout history.

A reasonable explanation does exist for this neglect, of course. Academic economists, despite the Schumpeterians, are still dominated by the early nineteenth-century worldview comprised of static commodities and their market-equilibrium states. Many business-strategy professors remain heavily oriented toward short-term Harvard case studies and simplified models of external competition that leave closed the black box of innovation. Contrast those approaches to the complex narratives of innovation routinely presented at HSS and SHOT conferences, in which creative innovators both struggle against and are inspired by a bewildering array of social and cultural factors. Comparing the output of historians of science and technology to the Harvard Business School case studies is almost like comparing analyses of entire wars to descriptions of combat skirmishes. I'm deliberately using this military analogy, of course, as encouraged by Bruno Latour's Science in Action and A. Rupert Hall's Philosophers at War. Let's face it; to best prepare undergraduate students for the frustrations, turmoil, betrayals, humiliations, and consequential need for sheer persistence in the face of the opposition that real innovators inevitably face, they need to be forearmed with vivid historical "experience." And nothing accomplishes this more effectively than the rich contextual trajectories of innovation that historians of science and technology work so hard to construct, subject to the highest standards of the humanities.

Teachers of the history of science and technology must focus on the cyclical process in which innovators establish and defend their domains of scientific and technological influence, only to have such power ultimately overturned by a new influx of innovators. With such a historical and pedagogical orientation toward never-ending competition over scarce intellectual, economic, and political resources, the strategic dimensions of science, engineering, and medicine can emerge quite clearly for undergraduate students. As the students of the Scientific Revolution class I taught at UCLA forced me to explain, after I confronted them with the seemingly appalling prospect of having to study obsolete and downright mystical scientific theories, a basic objective is to learn about the orthodox views of physical reality and technical utility that established authorities try to defend and that ambitious innovators seek to change, subject to the strategic constraints that are as valid today as they were in the sixteenth century.

To be continued in the July Newsletter

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Teaching Old History to Promote New Innovation: Part I

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