From Gunfire at Sea to Maps of War: Profound Implications for Humanitarian Innovation
MIT Professor Eric von Hippel is the author of Democratizing Innovation, a book I should have read when it was first published seven years ago. The purpose of this blog post, however, is to share some thoughts on “Gunfire at Sea: A Case Study in Innovation” (PDF), which Eric recently instructed me to read. Authored by Elting Morison in 1968, this piece is definitely required reading for anyone engaged in disruptive innovation, particularly in the humanitarian space. Morison was one of the most distinguished historians of the last century and the founder of MIT's Program in Science, Technology and Society (STS). The Boston Globe called him “an educator and industrial historian who believed that technology could only be harnessed to serve human beings when scientists and poets could meet with mutual understanding.”
Morison details in intriguing fashion the challenges of using light artillery at sea in the late 1,800's to illustrate how new technologies and new forms of power collide and indeed, “bombard the fixed structure of our habits of mind and behavior.” The first major innovative disruption in naval gunfire technology is the result of one person's acute observation. Admiral Sir Percy Scott happened to watched his men during target practice one day while the ship they were on was pitching and rolling acutely due to heavy weather. The resulting accuracy of the shots was dismal save for one man who was doing something slightly different to account for the swaying. Scott observed this positive deviance carefully and cobbled existing to technology to render the strategy easier to repeat and replicate. Within a year, his gun crews were remarkable accurate.
