Speaker
Description
The traditional account of making science practically useful goes back to Vannevar Bush’s 1945 “Report to the President.” This report promoted basic research “performed without thought of practical ends” (Bush 1945, chapter 3) as the linchpin for achieving practical utility. This approach has become known as the “linear model”; it places progress in epistemic or basic research at the center of technological progress. Novel procedures and devices are mostly created by relying on new scientific insights.
The linear model is now generally pronounced dead by economists and sociologists, but examples to this effect can be found. The discovery and use of giant magnetoresistence follows this pattern. However, it became clear in the past half-century that the path from scientific novelty to technological innovation suggested by the linear model was far less fruitful on a broad scale than Bush had imagined.
I suggest that there are three additional pathways of how scientific knowledge may be connected to technological novelty. One is the knowledge-driven mode of use-oriented research. This mode proceeds from existing knowledge. You start with what you know in order to find out what you can do. The invention of gas-discharge tubes or LEDs proceeded on the basis of earlier insights into the interaction of electricity and matter; the invention of liquid crystal displays owed much to earlier research on the effects of electrical fields on liquid crystals and on the properties of polarized light. In most cases, that knowledge needs to be expanded, and that is what practice-driven research seeks to accomplish. But the necessary knowledge-base and scientific understanding are already there beforehand; only the details are missing. No additional basic research spurs such utility-driven endeavors.
Furthermore, some practical achievements are based on mere observational regularities, or are the result of combining existing technology in new ways and thereby create new appliances. The dishwasher or the assembly line were conceived through engineering ingenuity, without consulting the latest advances in basic research. Such novelties are technology-driven, not research-driven. Some technological development proceeds independently of theory so that the spark of creativity does not reach the theory. This is the autonomy-of-technology mode of creating practical devices.
Finally, epistemically significant questions may be tackled within the framework of use-oriented research projects. In such application-innovative research, the fundamental knowledge required for a technological novelty is only generated in the context of practice. Some challenges of practice-driven research cannot be adequately mastered without addressing fundamental questions. Epistemic research is therefore also a – usually unintended – consequence of successful demand-driven research. For instance, the revolutionary concepts of retroviruses and prions were conceived in the context of identifying chains of infection. Application innovation is the temporal inverse of the linear model in that basic research is not the origin of technological development, but emerges at a later stage.
My claim is that basic research is sometimes productive in technological respect (in contrast to more recent claims to the contrary), but that additional modes of making science practically useful exist: knowledge-driven technology development, autonomy of technology, application-innovation.