Ideas go walkabout
by Jack Stilgoe
The morning was crammed with speakers. Charlie Leadbeater's introduction told the story of change. New things are happening abroad, as they always have, and we can see them as a threat or an opportunity. Charlie gave a very personal account of his time at labs in India and China, where scientists and businesses are rapidly changing the rules of the game. He reminded us that the Government knee-jerk was towards rhetorical protectionism. Up stepped Lord Sainsbury, trying to make our economic lives taste better. He argued that, in this debate, we had seen enough journalism. What we needed was "hard facts and economic expert judgement. He might be disappointed. If things are changing at unprecedented speed, hard facts are quickly going to become so soft as to be meaningless. Sheila Jasanoff, friend of Demos and all round science policy guru, reminded the sophisticated that "nobody in this room is unsophisticated enough to think that numbers by themselves mean anything."
His Excellency Kamalesh Sharma, who wears his title excellently, asked us, as we were rethinking the geography of ideas, to rethink the history of ideas.
His example: Aryabhatta, a 5th century Indian scientist, left university with an astronomy degree and claimed to have discovered that the Earth went round the Sun. A thousand years later, when the first British Universities were still shiny and new, Copernicus and Galileo began saying the same thing.
Nice story, I thought. It tells us that ideas don't just happen. They must travel. They must travel between places. And as my man Kuhn told us, using the same example, they must travel between people, who can't see the wood for the trees. They may even need to travel between millenia if the world is not yet ready for them. Scientific ideas do not make innovation. The journey to tangible benefit or to market is cobbled, complicated and often circular.
If we can take a message from the morning, it is that the threat of rapid innovation abroad is only a threat if we see it as one. The opportunity is in collaboration. It is in finding new ways of working together, of doing the things that scientists have always done - dissolving barriers, sharing knowledge and finding common languages.
For ideas to get places, people must travel to meet them. At a practical level, this means sending Demos researchers into the unknown (Hi Molly, hope all is well in China!). For more conceptual and empirical stuff, I reccommend watching this space.
