Innovation and Its Enemies: Why People Resist New Technologies

Juma's book will go down as one of the decade's most important works on innovation policy. Juma has written a book that is rich in history and insights about the social and economic forces and factors that have, again and again, lead various groups and individuals to oppose technological change. His extensive research documents how "technological controversies often arise from tensions between the need to innovate and the pressure to maintain continuity, social order, and stability" and how this tension is "one of today’s biggest policy challenges."Juma provides many meticulously detailed case studies of how special interests have resisted new technologies and developments throughout the centuries. Those case studies include: coffee and coffeehouses, the printing press, margarine, farm machinery, electricity, mechanical refrigeration, recorded music, transgenic crops, and genetically engineered salmon.He also explores issues related to the governance of emerging technologies in an era when "the pace of technological innovation is discernibly fast," and is accelerating in an exponential fashion. "The implications of exponential growth will continue to elude political leaders if they persist in operating with linear worldviews," he says. Juma stresses the general need for a flexible approach to policy and wants to see “entrepreneurialism exercised in the public arena” and for “decisive leaders to champion the application of new technologies."Throughout the text, Juma stresses the symbiotic relationship between risk-taking and progress. "The biggest risk that society faces by adopting approaches that suppress innovation is that they amplify the activities of those who want to preserve the status quo by silencing those arguing for a more open future," he says.He also points out that the enemies of change will often resort to fear-mongering and deceptive tactics to demonize new technologies. "Opponents of innovation hark back to traditions as if traditions themselves were not inventions at some point in the past." New products or methods of production were repeatedly but wrongly characterized as dangerous simply because they were not supposedly "natural" or "traditional" enough in character. Juma’s case studies powerfully illustrate why that dynamic continues to be a driving force in innovation policy debates and how it has delayed the diffusion of many important new goods and services throughout history.I highly recommend Prof. Juma's book to all those interested in the study of technological history and innovation policy.

This is an extremely interesting and well-researched look at the history of resistance to innovation. The author shows that the history of such opposition goes far beyond the most famous example of the Luddites, and includes fascinating accounts of the printing press, coffee, margarine as well as contemporary accounts of genetic engineering. In the course of this survey, itself an innovative approach to a thorny topic, Juma shows that there is more to overcoming such opposition than just filling the knowledge-deficit, and provides valuable insights as to how to address often very real public concerns about the disruptive impacts of new technologies.See my fuller review here: [...]

There's no question that this book includes many interesting facts about the adoption of various innovations, from coffee and margarine to tractors and alternating current. Some readers may find it worthwhile for those tidbits, and also share the author's faith in the improving power of Schumpeterian "creative destruction," which appears in the book as a sort of law of nature. But is this really a neutral, magisterial overview of different ways innovations have met and overcome resistance? I couldn't escape the impression that the wide range of anecdotes was being deployed for the sake of a much, much narrower agenda: promoting the adoption of agricultural biotech products, including genetically modified (GM) seeds, GM fish and the creations of synthetic biology.Since the author had been embroiled in some controversy about that in the recent past, let me clarify at the outset that I don't regard such an agenda as necessarily improper in any way. Judging by his online CV, Prof. Juma has been involved with agricultural biotechnology for over 30 years, working through NPOs, the UN and currently as a Harvard professor, among other positions. It happens that, according to the Boston Globe (2015 October 1), in 2014 he published a policy paper with some guidance from Monsanto and their marketing company, who had suggested a contents summary and headline — and he did not disclose this connection when doing so. As Prof. Juma observes in this book, generically and without any self-reference: "The perceived independence of such studies is critical to their effectiveness as sources of credible information" (@314). But while Monsanto and their marketing company may have provided some suggestions, it does not appear that Prof. Juma was paid by the company, nor that he changed his own views to suit theirs. I have no problem accepting the professor's explanation to the Globe that omitting to mention the connection was simply "bad judgment." My impression rather is that Prof. Juma's advocacy comes from his sincere belief in the potential of the technology, and his frustration at the fact that there is so much resistance to it, especially in the poor countries he has devoted his career to helping.The real problem with the agenda is that it makes the book much less interesting. It's something like when a news show interviews a politician or political consultant, who constantly comes back as soon as possible to being "on-message," regardless of the question asked. Agricultural biotech is mentioned in six out of the nine case studies in the book: two are explicitly about GM foods, and the chapter conclusions to four of the others (coffee, printing, margarine, mechanical refrigeration) also discuss parallels or implications for the products of genetic engineering or synthetic biology. The topic then returns with a vengeance in the conclusion.As a piece of advocacy for ag biotech, this book is far more balanced and sensitive than, say  Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa  by Robert Paarlberg: unlike that book, which glossed over intellectual property and other fairness issues, Prof. Juma repeatedly mentions the importance of making those affected by innovations feel included in their benefits. He also stresses the importance of keeping in mind the possible social impacts, such as on organized labor and local culture. Nonetheless, some of his ideas that sounded good at first blush, such as when he talks about "a different approach in dealing with skepticism by shifting from adversarial responses to collective learning" (@314), begin to sound "1984"-ish within a couple of sentences. It comes out that "collective learning" means something like propaganda to "sway the opinions of the … seemingly silent majority" (@314-315), while ignoring the active skeptics. When I first saw the term, I was hoping "collective" meant learning in which the proponents of the technology would participate too — but that's not what Prof. Juma has in mind. Apparently, he thinks they only have to learn how to sell people on their innovations, but have nothing further to learn about the innovations themselves.And that is the larger problem I had with the book: the book worships the New, and turns "creative destruction" into an ideology. (It would be good to remember the creepy origins of the phrase "creative destruction," which was coined not by Joseph Schumpeter but by his teacher, Werner Sombart: on the last page of "Krieg und Kapitalismus [War and Capitalism]" (1913), Sombart celebrated the genius of the German Empire in turning from wooden to iron battleships after it had utterly demolished the German forests in a shipbuilding arms race with its European rivals. Nice role model.) For Prof. Juma innovations are always a good thing, and its proponents are on the side of Right. The book acknowledges that certainly innovations can be insensitively introduced, leading to occasionally reasonable push-back — but at least as often, resistance is due to ignorance, or "incumbents," or "protectionism" masquerading as "what may appear to be legitimate right to know," in the case of food labeling (@303). Prof. Juma never considers that older technologies play important roles in our lives for much longer than we think, as pointed out by Denis Edgerton in  The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 . Ultimately all resistance to innovations *ought* to be overcome.The title captures this polarized attitude in a nutshell: innovation doesn't have critics, but only "enemies." Or consider this, apropos of the precautionary principle: "The biggest risk that society faces by adopting approaches that suppress innovation is that they amplify the activities of those who want to preserve the status quo by silencing those arguing for a more open future" (@289). Is questioning an innovation the same as "suppressing" it? Does it always entail as "silencing" those in favor of it? Most important, do all innovations *always* lead to more open futures? We seem to have amnesia abut the period after the Second World War (and in fact continuing through the Vietnam War), when physicists and other scientists were forced to confront their social responsibility for the atom bomb and other innovative weapons.The author's style is clear and relatively jargon-free, but is more oriented to the presentation of facts than to literary charm. The book has over 50 pages of endnotes, without a separate list of references. After years of publishers' stinting this way I'm beginning to feel it's quixotic to complain about it, but surely it wouldn't have cost Oxford anything extra to have at least included some page headers to help readers know that the note 37 they've just found is from Chapter 2, not the one they're hunting for from Chapter 7. All in all, despite an interesting diversity of cases, the author's advocacy of innovation seems too blindly insistent to lead to thoughtful policy — leading one to suspect that his frustration with the slow progress of agricultural biotech has gotten the better of him.

Excellent analysis

Excelente livro sobre algumas das principais inovações da humanidade. Mostra como é difícil vencer as barreiras culturais, tecnológicas e sociais.

This excellent book takes you on a journey through the histories of margarine, coffee, transgenic crops, super salmon and various other innovations that people tried to stop (or successfully stopped) in the past. It gives you a deep understanding as to why innovations are being fought by policy and law makers, the public and competitors. Again, this book showed me how important it is to communicate science and innovation to the public in the early stages of development. Though the first 30-50 pages of the book are rather difficult to read, you will be rewarded quickly.-A must read!!-

libro eccellente su di noi e sulla nostra ostilità a innovare e a avere confidenza nei cambiamenti. Documentatissimo e pieno di dati e di informazioni

Me gusta mucho la manera en que el autor describe la manera en que la innovación se ha ido presentando a lo largo de la historia de la humanidad. Compré el libro por curiosidad y lo recomiendo ampliamente. Creo que es una excelente pieza para mi biblioteca personal.