Vannevar Bush was one of the 20th century’s leading champions of American innovation. And creating this future would depend on developing a feedstock of new scientific insights. scientific and industrial establishment: Grand innovative vistas lay ahead, especially in electronics, aeronautics and chemistry. Though Bush didn’t actually use the word innovation in the report, his manifesto presented an objective for the U.S. The report advocated for a large federal role in funding scientific research. In 1945, Bush worked on a landmark report - famously titled “Science, The Endless Frontier” - for President Harry Truman. In the mid-century era, one of the leading champions of America’s innovation capabilities was Vannevar Bush, an MIT academic. Yet what changed global agriculture was a broad industrial effort to transform that invention into an innovation - that is, to replace a popular technology with something better and cheaper on a national or global scale. “Innovation is the market introduction of a technical or organizational novelty, not just its invention,” Schumpeter wrote in 1911.Īn invention like Fritz Haber’s process for making synthetic fertilizer, developed in 1909, was a dramatic step forward, for example. In his academic writings, Schumpeter argued that vibrant economies were driven by innovators whose work replaced existing products or processes. The elevation of the term likely owes a debt to the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter, according to the late science historian Benoît Godin.
While its origins go back some 500 years (at first it was used to describe a new legal and then religious idea), the word’s popularization was a post–World War II phenomenon. But a different word, one that caught on around the 1950s, seemed more apt in describing the technological ideas making way for modern life: innovation. Public figures like Edison or, say, Henry Ford were often described as inventors. Hughes noted: “The remarkably prolific inventors of the late nineteenth century, such as Edison, persuaded us that we were involved in a second creation of the world.” By the 1920s, this world - more functional, more sophisticated and increasingly more comfortable - had come into being. And on the horizon, airplanes promised a radical transformation in travel and commerce.Īs the technology historian Thomas P. New methods for making synthetic fertilizer portended a revolution in agriculture. Electric power and radio broadcasts came into homes. Long-distance telephone service connected New York with San Francisco. Suddenly, consumers could enjoy affordable automobiles. In the early decades of the 20th century, a slew of technologies began altering daily life with seemingly unprecedented speed and breadth.
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