Innovation Practice - Telenor

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http://enteuxis.org/nathan/portfolio/writing/1999/
xian_environmental_ethics. html
Wallerstein, I. The Modern World System: Capitalist
Agriculture and the Origins of the European World
Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York, Academic
Press, 1974. Summary available at
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/wallerstein.html
White, L Jr. Medieval Technology & Social Change.
Oxford University Press, 1962.
White, L Jr. The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic
Crisis. Science, 155, 1967.
Notes
1) A more thorough analysis of long waves theories of
development is found in e.g. Schumpeter and Freeman,
see Buland, 1996, pages 32–37.
2) William Baumol (“The Free-market Innovation
Machine: Analyzing the Growth Miracle of Capitalism”,
Princeton University Press, 2002) rejects the
view that the way capitalism benefits society mainly
is through price competition. He sees instead an
“arms race”, and inter-firm collaboration, where no
firm in an innovating industry dares to fall behind
the others in new products and processes. Baumol
stresses that large companies use innovation as a
prime competitive weapon. However, firms do not
want to risk too much as innovation is costly, and
can be made obsolete. So firms split the difference
through the sale of technology licenses and participation
in technology-sharing that pay huge dividends
to the economy as a whole – and thereby
make innovation a routine feature of economic life.
Baumol views this process as the reason behind the
unparalleled growth of modern capitalist economies.
3) E.g. most people still think that scholars in Medieval
Europe believed the earth was flat, that dissections
were illegal until the 16th century and that scientists
were systematically persecuted. This is sometimes
even said in basic school texts and popular magazines
on Science and History, not to mention underresearched
potboilers such as Dan Brown’s “Angels
and Demons” and “The Da Vinci Code”. In Norway
even a magazine on History – “Levende historie” –
recently published an article by the novelist Kjartan
Fløgstad, explaining that Magellan’s (1470–1519)
circumnavigation of the globe proved that the earth
was not flat.
4) Especially Ibn Sina (Avicienna, 980–1037) and Ibn
Rushd (Averroes, 1126–1198). Averroe was considered
controversial in Islamic Spain, however he had
a great impact on Western-European thought. In
Islamic lands, where orthodoxy and al-Ghazali’s
intuitive and mystical sense of the Divine was influential,
Averroes’ rationalism did have less of a following
than in Europe. Muslim scholars reached
great heights in Medicine, Astronomy and Optics,
however science was never institutionalized as in
ISSN 0085-7130 © Telenor ASA 2004
White, L Jr. Machina Ex Deo. MIT Press, 1968.
White, L Jr. Cultural Climates and Technological
Advance in the Middle Ages. Viator, 2, 1971.
Wilkinson, L (ed). Earthkeeping in the 90’s – stewardship
of creation, revised edition. William B. Eerdmans,
1991.
Wulff, E. Det teknologiske paradigmeskiftet. Trondheim,
SINTEF, 1993.
Europe. Natural science was always considered as
the “Foreign Sciences” in the Islamic world.
5) Abelard’s influence in the thirteenth century was
great, mainly through his pupil Peter Lombard.
Even if it is an exaggeration to represent Abelard as
“the first modern”, the founder of the University of
Paris, etc., he was an enlightened continuator of the
Carolingian revival of learning and inspired later
science and literature.
6) While White’s “The History of the Warfare between
Science and Religion ” (1895) is singularly unhelpful,
the last decades a growing number of works
have left the conflict paradigm. New sources and
new research indicate that modern experimental science
and physics grew out of an outlook that
believed in natural laws (as there was a Lawgiver)
and that affirmed the wisdom and virtue of studying
nature (as it was a valuable and reasonable creation,
not an illusion one should look beyond in
order to escape this world). And that one should not
decide this by a-priori philosophy, but by experiment
(the Creator should not be limited by any philosophy,
the only way to discover what God had done in
nature was to study it, through observation and
experiments). This led to a strong insistence on logical
coherence and experimental verification. Even if
these were present in a qualitative way among the
Greeks, the vital contribution of Medieval Europe
was to strengthen and refine them into a more effective
union. This included a quantitative precision by
using mathematics in formulation of theories, and
then verifying them by observation and precise measurements.
This transition was achieved principally
by Robert Grosseteste (1168–1253). An official condemnation
in 1277 of philosophical statements that
limited the power of God, contributed to the number
of natural philosophers that began to look beyond
Aristotelian philosophy and paved the way for
empirical science, rather than primarily building on
philosophical deductions. See e.g. Stark’s illuminating
development of this (Stark 2003). The Alexandrian
theologian and scientist John Philoponus in
the 6th century anticipated such later developments.
However, the first modern physicist may have been
John Buridan, professor at Sorbonne around 1330.
Telektronikk 2.2004