Safe Innovation

Is there such a thing as “safe innovation”?

Is it in the public interest for such a concept to exist?

As the world’s economies drag themselves out of the mire, mankind will start to do what it does best – innovate.

A question I ask myself is whether or not human beings can be allowed to innovate in an unfettered fashion. One could argue that the futures business (aka Barings and Leeson), drug scandals and collateralised debt obligations are examples of the chaos caused when human ingenuity is allowed to run rampant.

Yet fettering creativity can destroy the very essence which allows human existence to flourish.

A few thoughts on this subject.

Innovation without control allows that other human instinct – greed – to contaminate the planet. I conclude that there needs to be some form of control in place to ensure the public interest is protected.

To exercise some form of control one needs to be aware the innovation is occuring in the first place. I would therefore strongly argue that there needs to be some form of registration mechanism allowing new products, new ways of doing things and new initiatives to be subject to some form of scrutiny.

The danger with such scrutiny is that valuable intellectual property can leak diluting its value and the interest of owners in innovating.

Having bothered to force registration one need to ensure that the public interest effects of innovation are vetted and action taken to prohibit society from blowing itself up. The key issue here is whether or not some supra-national a-political entity does the vetting based on detailed rules or whether some form of principles-based approach is applied.

I remain a great fan of asking human beings to justify that they have met a set of principles up-front and with the benefit of hindsight. This approach allows ingenuity to flourish but requires innovators to be held to account.

The alternative is a rules-based world where human beings will turn their ingenuity to complying with the rules but breaching the spirit within which they are crafted.

What is clear is that humans should not be fully trusted to comply with principles or rules. Where the rewards of innovation are great, the human spirit frequently departs from what is good for society at large.