Calling for innovation is, paradoxically, a common way of avoiding change when change is not wanted. The argument that future science and technology will deal with global warming is an instance. It is implicitly arguing that in today’s world only what we have is possible. Yet we have the technological capacity to do things very differently: we are not technologically determined.

Getting away…from the conflation of use and invention/innovation will in itself have a major impact on our thinking about novelty generation. The twentieth century was awash with inventions and innovations, so that most had to fail. Recognising this will have a liberating effect. We need no longer worry about being resistant to innovation, or being behind the times, when we chose not to take up an innovation. Living in an inventive age requires us to reject the majority that are on offer. We are free to oppose technologies we do not like, however much interested pundits and governments tell us it is essential to accept, say, GM crops. There are alternative technologies, alternative paths of invention. The history of invention is not the history of a necessary future to which we must adapt or die, but rather of failed futures, and of futures firmly fixed in the past.

We should feel free to research, develop, innovate, even in areas which are considered out of date by those stuck in passé futuristic ways of thinking. Most inventions will continue to fail, the future will remain uncertain. Indeed the key problem in research policy should be ensuring that there are more good ideas, and thus many more failed ideas. Stopping projects at the right time is the key to a successful invention and innovation policy, but doing this means being critical of the hype that surrounds, and often justifies and promotes funding for invention.

Innovators make different kinds of mistakes. The waveguide, for instance, might be considered a mistake of perception. It was an instance where a technology of legitimate promise is eclipsed by a breakthrough elsewhere—in another corporate department, at another company, at a university, wherever—that solves a particular problem better…

Mistakes of perception are not the same as mistakes of judgement, though. In the latter, an idea that developers think will satisfy a need or want does not. It may prove useless because of its functional shortcomings, or because its too expensive in relation to its modest appeal, or because it arrives in the marketplace too early or too late. Or because of all these reasons combined. The Picturephone was a mistake of judgement.