Turning Stone into Gold and Silver into Stone: On the Importance of Studying Innovation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACTThis discussion paper offers a reflection on the importance of studying innovation, using illustrative examples from 16th century Spanish history. Comparing the innovation policies of two successive rulers of the ancient city of Granada the paper makes the case that well-functioning innovation systems can be gradually developed, but also rapidly destroyed, through different public policies. The main argument is that it is possible to oppose the devastation of successful innovation systems by conducting and diffusing good social research that points to principles upon which such systems are based.Keywords: innovation systems, public policy, social developmentWithout science and technology, the life of manwould be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.Keith PavittFor a long time, I thought that there must be plenty of topics that are both more important and more enjoyable to study than innovation. I have come to believe that there are certainly topics that are more enjoyable, but few that are more important. This change of heart did not occur all of a sudden, but came sneaking up on me gradually. Sure enough, academic books and lectures have taught me that innovation -the creation of higher quality, lower cost products and services - is crucial for the long-term economic growth and welfare of a society; that it does not accrue in equal amounts in all parts of the world; that specific combinations of public policies and social structure offer distinct possibilities for innovation and so on. Yet, these theories never set off an eureka moment of the sort that clears the fog in front of the researcher's eyes and makes it evident why some obscure problem is worth years of arduous study. Rather, I think my conviction emerged from glimpses of resemblance between observations I made at the University when I was trying hard to think about innovation and some I made in my leisure time when I was trying very hard not to. One such glimpse I got while holidaying in the ancient Spanish city of Granada in the summer of 2003. At the time, I was spending lazy hours leafing through Amin Malouf s (1993) Leo the African and Washington Irving's (1832) Tales of the Alhambra. The books told the following story: After the fall of Cordoba and Seville, Spanish Muslims sought refuge in Granada, where the founder of the Nasrid dynasty, Muhammad Ihn Al-Ahmar established an independent emirate in 1238. Stretching from the strait of Gibraltar to east of Almeria this became the final remnant of Muslim domination on the Iberian peninsula ruled by the Nasrids from the lavish Alhambra palace for 250 years until the Catholic invasion in 1492.In this period, Granada became one of the richest and most populous regions in medieval Europe. Being tolerant of people from different religious and cultural backgrounds the Nasrids attracted a large number of scholars, artisans and merchants who were persecuted elsewhere on the peninsula. This fast growing population of highly skilled inhabitants induced two centuries of artistic, scientific and economic splendour in Granada. In those days, the ancient university of Granada functioned as a pathway of science and technology from Greece to Western Europe and, because of its wide acclaim as the best university of the world, it attracted students from Europe, North Africa and Asia-minor who exchanged knowledge about a wide variety of scientific and technical topics such as medicine, algebra, cultivation of crops, textile manufacture, water irrigation and architecture. Moreover, in this period Granada's manufacturing industries thrived. Textiles of unsurpassed quality were widely exported and the region's silk products were used as a benchmark of superior quality. In the Romantic classic Tales of the Alhambra, Washington Irving illustrates the success of king Al- Ahmar in the following way:The Moors of Granada regarded the Alhambra as a miracle of art and had a tradition that the king who founded it dealt in magic, or at least was versed in alchemy; by means he procured the immense sums of gold expended in its erection. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".