Public Intelligence Blog

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.

Continue reading “Patrick Meier: Stages of Resistance to Innovation — From Naval Gunfire to Blind Spys”

we petition the obama administration to:

Require free access over the Internet to scientific journal articles arising from taxpayer-funded research.

We believe in the power of the Internet to foster innovation, research, and education. Requiring the published results of taxpayer-funded research to be posted on the Internet in human and machine readable form would provide access to patients and caregivers, students and their teachers, researchers, entrepreneurs, and other taxpayers who paid for the research. Expanding access would speed the research process and increase the return on our investment in scientific research.

The highly successful Public Access Policy of the National Institutes of Health proves that this can be done without disrupting the research process, and we urge President Obama to act now to implement open access policies for all federal agencies that fund scientific research.

Click here to learn more and — if desired — sign the petition.

Why Even Failed Activism Succeeds

I enjoy reading histories of past activism, including memoirs by long-time activists, such as Lawrence Wittner's new book, Working for Peace and Justice.

Almost every such account includes belated discoveries of the extent to which a government was been spying on and infiltrating activist groups.

And almost every such account includes belated discoveries of the extent to which government officials were influenced by activist groups even while pretending to ignore popular pressure.

These revelations can be found in the memoirs of the government officials as well, such as in George W. Bush's recollection of how seriously the Republican Senate Majority Leader was taking public pressure against the war on Iraq in 2006.

Of course, activism that appears ineffectual at the time can succeed in a great many ways, including by influencing others, even young children, who go on to become effective activists — or by influencing firm opponents who begin to change their minds and eventually switch sides.

The beautiful thing about nonviolent activism is that, while risking no harm, it has the potential to do good in ways small and large that ripple out from it in directions we cannot track or measure.

Continue reading “David Swanson: Even Failed Activism Succeeds”