Technocracy and Savant Economies

What kind of country do we want to live in and how will innovation and knowledge help to achieve our goals? For many reasons these questions should be the first questions asked when considering what innovation policy aims to achieve.

With the above questions in mind, an additional set of concerns rising from fundamental research is that in the absence of policy making knowledge about the fundamentals of knowledge itself there is a danger that knowledge-related policy, and particularly innovation policy, will simply contribute to the construction of what can be called savant economies and savant organisations: economies and organisations with abundant knowledge, expertise, and technology but which lack the wisdom to apply them well to create a more humane society and long-term sustainability. Historically, innovation policy seems to have been going in this savant direction. It is now time to acknowledge for example that technological innovation has been a long-term contributor to climate change and the innovation system has not had the wisdom to respond in a timely or comprehensive enough way to the challenges it has been part of creating. Part of the remedial action required is developing a better understanding of how knowledge and innovation are liked to each other and to a larger context.

In a semantic analysis of a 1.3 million word corpus of knowledge-related policy documents from around the world, knowledge itself is connected in only a very weak way to the larger discourse around it. In other words, it graphically shows an absence of an organising and guiding theory of knowledge. What is also shown is that conceptual frameworks about Telecoms Infrastructure, for example, are more detailed, coherent, and integrated than they are for knowledge. This is indicative of the technocratic attitude informing knowledge and innovation policy production. 

The spectre of savant economies resulting from technocratic policy is unpalatable, and the degraded environmental, social, and cultural amenity that is likely to eventuate in them is unacceptable in a civil and democratic society. Economies and societies that experience only technological advancement, or ‘cleverness’ are meaningless from social policy and democratic perspectives. It is important therefore to ask what might the adverse effects of knowledge in the absence of wisdom be and how might innovation be a disservice to the community? It is inadvisable to assume that all innovation and knowledge are necessarily good. It is instructive that the American business, Enron, was an innovation focussed and knowledge intensive business that went horribly wrong. It was a very clever company with access to a fantastic array of knowledgeable people but had no wisdom. Enron was a catastrophic failure of knowledge and innovation because its management not only lacked ethics, but failed to reflexively critique the ideas that underlay its business model. The same can be said of the sub-prime mortgage and Bear Stearns collapses. In each of these cases, increasingly abstract concepts were bundled into ‘products’, the foundations of which were akin to the South Sea Bubble or 17^th century Dutch tulip prices. In other words, a mania for clever innovations that seem almost intoxicatingly good, as well as any other ungrounded claims of the virtues of knowledge and innovation, must be treated cautiously. Doing this requires a sophisticated vocabulary and conceptual foundation. This means not just a robust business community, whose capacity for ‘product’ innovation is strong and inherent, but also a robust intellectual community who can critique existing or proposed positions and point to new or different possibilities. There are many benefits in knowledge and innovation but also many potential pitfalls if we do not proceed wisely.

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