Technology, Business and the Market

From R&D to Desirable Products

John S. Sheldrake

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317046295
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technik & Maschinenbau
• Subtopic: Angewandte Wissenschaften

John Sheldrake's long experience of teaching business and management to engineers has highlighted a gap in the knowledge of students and practitioners alike, between their grasp of developments in science and technology and how these developments lead to the creation of successful products. Using case studies, Technology, Business and the Market explores the impact of new materials, techniques and technologies, and looks at the links between innovation, entrepreneurship, business (including finance), design, manufacturing, branding and marketing. The author examines the ways in which scientific endeavour is conditioned and even distorted by contextual issues such as finance and fashion. This demonstration of the synthesis of technology, business and the market has relevance for students, practitioners and policy makers in established and emerging markets.

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

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This short book explores the linkages between science, technology, business and the market – from initial innovation to final consumption. It examines the ways in which scientific endeavour prompts the development of new technical possibilities and processes – some constructive and others destructive in their consequences. It also examines the ways in which scientific endeavour is conditioned and even distorted by contextual issues such as finance and fashion. Of course, the word science has various meanings ranging from the modest ‘organized body of knowledge’ to the heroic ‘search for fundamental explanations of how the world works’. It should perhaps be borne in mind that the word science only gradually replaced the term natural philosophy during the early years of the nineteenth century and that the word scientist was only recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1840 (Holmes 2009). Equally, the arbitrary compartmentalization between the various aspects of scientific activity only emerged with the passage of time and the natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ranged freely and without inhibition across what we now construe as more or less immutable disciplinary boundaries (Jardine 1999). For the purposes of this book I have taken science to be ‘systematic knowledge of the physical world obtained through observation and experimentation’. Further, I have taken technology to mean ‘the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry’. As will be seen, the outcomes of scientific research are most often not spectacular breakthroughs which substantially improve human existence but apparently trivial applications which make our razors run smoother or our fries stay crisper. Technological development, by its very nature, often renders earlier technologies redundant. A major side effect of this is the creation and destruction of skills and jobs with sometimes dire social consequences. Rapid technological progress can therefore bring social disruption as well as social improvement. There are many tensions in all of this which generate the need to explore the costs of progress as well as its benefits. There are also numerous ambiguities and contradictions.

The chapters which follow are arranged thematically and, although they contain some measure of chronological order, there is no overarching narrative. Chapter 2 provides an introductory account of the historical origins of modern science in the West, together with some of the theoretical issues involved. A brief account of the contributions of John Locke, Isaac Newton and David Hume is given, together with an examination of the work and influence of two proto-scientists – the potter Josiah Wedgwood and the surgeon John Hunter. Finally, an account of the emergence of modern management during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is provided. Chapter 3 traces the linkages between scientific endeavour, applied science and technological progress through the mediation of commercially sponsored research and development (R&D). It also examines some aspects of the philosophy of science through the debate between Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. The subject of industrial R&D is considered through an account of the work carried out at the Edison, Bell and RCA laboratories. An account is given of the combination of technological and managerial development which resulted in the emergence of mass production at the Ford Motor Company and the development of the Sloan Structure at General Motors. Finally, the further evolution of modern management during the early years of the twentieth century is examined. Chapter 4 examines the nature of entrepreneurship and innovation, and offers a brief account of the role of venture capital. The work of the economist Joseph Schumpeter is outlined, specifically his idea of creative destruction as the driving force behind capitalism. A consideration of the role of innovation management leads to an analysis of three specific examples – Ray Kroc at McDonald’s; Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce at Intel; and Bill Gates at Microsoft. Chapter 5 examines the developing role of the industrial designer and the links between design and product innovation. The influence of designers such as William Morris, Peter Behrens and Raymond Loewy is considered, together with the design policy developed by Eliot Noyes at IBM, Dieter Rams at Braun and Frank Pick at London Transport. Finally, the phenomenon of retro is examined, together with an example in the shape of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. Chapter 6 examines some of the impacts of technological change by reference to the emergence of the quality movement in Japan and the evolution of advanced manufacturing. An account of the origins and development of containerization is provided through a consideration of the inputs of Malcolm McLean and Keith Tantlinger. The impact of containerization in terms of facilitating global trade and outsourcing is examined through the specific example of Steve Jobs and Apple. Finally, an account of the development and managerial impacts of the Internet are given through an account of the ideas of Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Chapter 7 examines the issues of business policy and strategy and links them to some of the key elements in marketing. Examples are provided in the shape of Boeing versus Airbus and the future development of aircraft design; AMEX and improved customer service; and Procter and Gamble and the development of brand management and market research. Chapter 8 examines some of the criticisms of marketing and its role within the prevailing capitalist economic system. An account of the so-called throw-away society is given using insights provided by Vance Packard and Thorstein Veblen with an example in the shape of the Gillette safety razor. The phenomenon of planned obsolescence is examined using the example of General Motors and the work of Charles F. Kettering and Harley J. Earl. Finally, two Marxist-inspired critiques of the system are provided using insights from Herbert Marcuse and Harry Braverman. Chapter 9 is linked in tone to the previous chapter and examines the topic of sustainability including the challenge of environmentalism, together with the impact of the corporate responsibility and business ethics movement; theoretical insights are provided by an examination of the work of C. P. Snow and Fritz Schumacher. Chapter 10 provides some concluding remarks and pointers to likely future developments. The texts I have used can be found in the extensive bibliography.

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CHAPTER 2

CONTEXTUAL AND THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

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INTRODUCTION

This chapter provides an introductory account of the rise of modern science in the West, together with some of the theoretical issues involved. We spend our lives in a world dominated by science and technology and it is almost impossible to conceive of civilised existence without the products and services which science and technology provide. A few examples will give the flavour – electricity, gas and the supply of clean water; air travel, automobiles and railways; computers, television, telephones, the Internet; relatively safe surgery, dentistry, the control of (most) epidemic diseases; central heating, refrigeration, plastics and artificial fibres and so on and so on. Perhaps the greatest single change behind all of this was the transition (in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain) from an advanced organic economy based on agriculture, to a mineral economy based on coal, iron and associated manufacturing (Wrigley 1988). A central technological feature of this change was the development of the steam engine and its deployment in factories as the prime means of driving machinery and on railways as the means of traction. The development of metallurgy and the design and construction of factories (as well as railways) were largely informed by empirical observation and carried out by practical engineers rather than ‘scientists’ (Habakkuk 1962). Having said this, however, science as we currently understand it was gaining ever greater potency and emerging into a position of influence alongside engineering. Not least, the insights derived from Newtonian physics were becoming diffused across the wider society as science, education and industry came together to an unprecedented extent during the first half of the nineteenth century (Huff 2011). This combination of scientific thought and empirical application was informed by specific philosophical and theoretical reflections.

A somewhat arbitrary but nevertheless key date in the history of Western science is 1543. In that year Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, demonstrating that the Earth, like the other planets, revolves around the Sun while Andreas Vesalius (1514–64) produced On the Fabric of the Human Body, the first modern study of anatomy. Essentially, Copernicus provided a fresh insight into what exists outside of us in space, while Vesalius did the same for what happens inside of us in our bodies (Trombley 2011). Both of these thinkers had embarked on major scientific voyages of discovery characteristic of what became known as the Scientific Revolution. In the early years of the seventeenth century the statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) outlined the possibilities for technological progress and also advocated a scientific method based on careful observation and the amassing of data – the method known as induction – moving from the particular to the general (Ball 2013). This was the approach adopted by Bacon’s contemporary, William Harvey (1578–1657) whose discovery of the circulation of the blood was published in his book On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in 1628. Bacon’s ideas influenced the founding of the Royal Society in London in 1660 under the patronage of Charles II (1630–85) with the purpose of fostering understanding of the natural world through observation and experiment and having as its motto nullius in verba – take nobody’s word for it. In the sections of this chapter which follow, the contributions of John Locke (1632–1704), Isaac Newton (1642–1727) and David Hume (1711–76) will be considered, together with work of two proto-scientists – the potter Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95) and the surgeon John Hunter (1728–93). Finally, a brief account of the origins of modern management is given.

THE IMPACT OF LOCKE AND NEWTON

Broadly speaking, three revolutions occurred or were initiated in Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. First, a political revolution, which saw absolute monarchy overthrown and replaced, initially by a republic, and subsequently by a constitutional monarchy with power shared between the King and Parliament. Secondly, a scientific revolution, which generated the emergence of a new way of understanding the universe and humanity’s position in it and in the process challenging beliefs which had in some cases prevailed for hundreds of years. Finally, an industrial revolution began which gathered pace during the nineteenth century and, in the course of a century and a half, changed Britain decisively from a sparsely populated, rather backward agricultural country into a densely populated, urbanized industrial one with a burgeoning overseas empire. Perhaps it is more accurate to describe what occurred as a first Industrial Revolution, associated with the development of the steam engine and the application of factory discipline. This was followed by a second industrial revolution, dating from around 1840 to the 1950s, which was characterized by a radical transformation in transportation and communication through the development of railways, the telephone, radio, automobiles and aeroplanes. Finally, a third industrial revolution began in the 1950s based on information technology and placing greater emphasis on the ‘service sector’ and science-based industries such as synthetic chemicals and pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, electronics and computer hardware and software (McCraw 2000).

The political and social revolutions which occurred in the seventeenth century were accompanied by the emergence of new financial arrangements and the shift in social relationships associated with capitalism. London was at the centre of these developments, becoming the largest city in Europe and, together with commerce, providing a focus for intellectual inquiry and the arts. In terms of intellectual inquiry two specific thinkers of the period had an immense and lasting impact: John Locke and Isaac Newton. Locke, as well as being an influential political theorist and ideologist for the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1689, was also a physician and philosopher. Locke’s political thought, contained in his Two Treatises of Government published in 1689, advocated limited government, opposing the notion of ‘the Divine Right of Kings’ and also his older contemporary Thomas Hobbes’ (1588–1679) arguments for political absolutism. For Locke, human understanding is inevitably limited and this limitation on absolute knowledge prompted him in the direction of qualified toleration of the beliefs of others – a sort of proto-liberalism pointing forward to the ideas of John Stuart Mill (1806–73) a century and a half later. All of this was consistent with Locke’s philosophical position which he outlined in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding published in 1690. Locke was an empiricist and held the belief that all knowledge is ultimately derived from experience. On this view there is nothing which can be known to be true or false independent of experience. According to Locke the human mind at birth is like a blank sheet of paper, a tabula rasa, on which experience will, so to speak, ‘write’. What can be known with any certainty is therefore restricted to that which the senses can perceive. There are obvious problems with this, not least the extent to which we can trust our senses, but for Locke’s purposes it enabled him to develop an approach which describes knowledge as merely the aggregate of things which reach our senses. Basically, the world is there to be discovered using our five senses augmented and enhanced from time to time by instrumentation and techniques of various kinds – in Locke’s period the development of the telescope and the (primitive) microscope are obvious examples. Locke’s views, however limited, left a lasting impression on philosophy in the Anglo-Saxon world – not least a suspicion of overarching philosophical systems on the Continental pattern. Interestingly, they also had a substantial impact on the so-called Enlightenment in eighteenth-century France and in the emerging United States of America – in both cases contributing to the ferment of ideas leading to political revolution (Himmelfarb 2008).

Isaac Newton, like Locke, was a polymath who carried out original research in optics, mathematics, mechanics and gravitation as well as producing historical studies and investigations in chemistry and alchemy. Newton considered his most productive years to be the mid-1660s, a period when he spent much of his time away from his work in Cambridge (which was threatened by bubonic plague) at his family home in Lincolnshire. It was there, according to the well-known story (or probably myth), that he saw an apple fall from a tree and asked himself the question ‘if the apple on the tree was at rest, then it gradually accelerated while falling, what causes that acceleration?’ His answer, of course, was gravity. Newton developed and refined his initial insight, partly in correspondence with Robert Hooke (1635–1703), the inaugural curator of experiments at the Royal Society, and eventually produced a revolutionary synthesis of astronomy, mechanics and mathematics in his Mathematical Principals of Natural Philosophy (often referred to as the Principia) published in Latin in 1687 with revised editions in 1713 and 1726. An English translation appeared in 1729. Newton’s work is ranked as one of the greatest achievements in abstract thought and became the dominant scientific paradigm (see Chapter 3) until it came under increasing pressure in the final years of the nineteenth century (Okasha 2002).

DAVID HUME AND THE PROBLEM OF INDUCTION

David Hume (1711–76) was a philosopher and historian who both built on and challenged the empiricist philosophical foundations provided by Locke and, as perhaps befits an historian, he was a sceptic. Hume was a ‘man of letters’ who published widely, his most significant works for our purposes being A Treatise on Human Nature (1739) and Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). In these books he advanced a theory of human knowledge (epistemology) in which he claimed that human beings are basically creatures of instinct and habit whose mental lives are dominated by passion rather than reason and whose beliefs are formed by mechanisms of association and custom rather than a priori reflection. On this view reason is the servant of the passions rather than the other way around. What we experience as the causal regularity of the world is merely a product of custom. We experience certain natural sequences and this experience leads us to anticipate the ongoing repetition of these sequences. A familiar cause is associated in the mind with the usual effect and from this we construct a set of rules calculated to predict natural sequences and expectations (Mautner 2005). This brings us to the problem of induction – sometimes referred to as ‘Hume’s problem’ – briefly put it is that no sequence of events, or number of confirming observations, allows us to say with certainty that such events will always occur in the future or that all objects of the class observed will always conform to what we have so far observed. In the customary example, if every swan we have so far observed is white, we cannot say with certainty that ‘all swans are white’. However, if we observe a single black swan it would permit us to say that ‘not all swans are white’. Although we can introduce levels of probability to take account of our lack of certainty, we nevertheless have to admit to the limitations of our knowledge which therefore always remains tentative and subject to change. This leads us on to the work of Karl Popper which we will examine in Chapter 3.

JOSIAH WEDGWOOD – POTTER, INDUSTRIALIST AND EMPIRICAL GENIUS

Josiah Wedgwood was born in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent in 1730 into a family of potters who were also religious dissenters and therefore excluded from contemporary public life. He was the youngest of 13 children and, owing to the death of his father, left school when he was only nine and became apprenticed to an elder brother. At the age of eleven he suffered an attack of smallpox which left him with a permanently weakened right leg and unable to operate the treadle of the potter’s wheel. Instead, he spent his time researching the craft of pottery and working on new designs. During the 1750s, having completed his apprenticeship, Wedgwood entered into partnership with perhaps the leading pottery maker of the day, Thomas Whieldon (1719–95). Over the next decade, Wedgwood continued his experimental work and eventually developed a lead-glazed, cream-coloured earthenware known as ‘creamware’ which he patented in 1763. Wedgwood ended his partnership with Whieldon in 1759 and set up in business on his own account producing his pottery for a rapidly growing market, including among his customers Queen Charlotte (1744–1818), the wife of George III (1738–1820). Royal patronage massively expanded the demand for Wedgwood’s ceramics, not least among the commercial classes whose new wealth was supporting an emerging ‘consumer boom’ (Wilson 2012). In 1764 Wedgwood married his wealthy third cousin Sarah Wedgwood (1734–1815). As well as being intelligent, creative and generally accomplished, Sarah also had money – money which Josiah Wedgwood was able to invest in the development of pottery manufacture on an industrial basis at the factory he established in Burslem. Here, and later at his new works called Etruria, Wedgwood combined innovative factory layout with the advanced division of labour, subdividing the skills of the potter (i.e. mixing, shaping, decorating, glazing and firing) in order to maximize efficiency.

The expansion of Wedgwood’s business was inhibited by the contemporary transport system; based on packhorses and horse-drawn waggons it was both slow and likely to result in many breakages of his fragile wares. In search of a remedy to this problem Wedgwood became involved in Britain’s first transport revolution – the engineering of the canals. During the 1760s he collaborated with the canal pioneer Francis Egerton (1736–1803) the Third Duke of Bridgewater, and the engineer James Brindley (1716–72), in the creation of the Trent and Mersey Canal, linking the River Mersey near Runcorn in Cheshire to the River Trent in Derbyshire – a distance of over 90 miles and one of the civil engineering marvels of the day. Wedgwood’s campaign for the building of the Trent and Mersey Canal brought him into contact with the physician Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802). Darwin had studied at St John’s College, Cambridge and at the Edinburgh University Medical School and was associated with the so-called Lunar Society of Birmingham. The Lunar Society was an informal learned society of industrialists and scientists, or natural philosophers as they were then called, which met and also corresponded from the 1760s through to the early years of the nineteenth century. The name Lunar Society arose from the custom of members gathering at the time of the full moon to make travelling easier and safer at a time when street lighting was minimal. Although the actual composition of the group varied, it included such important figures as the inventor and mechanical engineer James Watt (1736–1819) and his business partner, the manufacturer Matthew Boulton (1728–1809), who between them revolutionized the development and application of the steam engine; the chemist Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) who discovered oxygen; and the botanist William Withering (1741–99) who discovere...