Everything Old Is New Again

“Sooner or later, everything old is new again.

– Stephen King, The Colorado Kid

We live in a world of accelerating change. We feel this in our guts, but the exponential pace of change is also evident in the data about the pace of technology change—from computing and biology to materials science and robotics. It is a very different world than it was only a generation ago.

Despite this exponential flux, we recognize that much of what makes us human has not changed; in fact, the areas of stability may be more important than what has changed. What people value—the chance to contribute, a sense of autonomy, opportunity for growth, being part of a community—have not changed nearly as much even as the technologies that mediate them. The most important things seem etched into who we are as people.

The Hype Cycle, popularized by Gartner Group (2022), captures nicely both the radical technology change we are experiencing and the predictable slow adoption of new capabilities. Gartner tracks four phases of adoption: inflated expectations, disillusionment, enlightenment, and productivity. Today, there are more new technologies riding the curve—and it seems some of them have achieved a very rapid adoption cycle—but the cycle itself is predictable. What is old is still new.

This effect is magnified because our minds are wired to create patterns that make sense of the new in terms of the old, and our egos want very much to live in the places that they have been successful in the past. The persistence of human values and the human cycles that moderate dramatic change make our lives both more manageable and more interesting.

And yet. . .some things really are new. This creates a meta-problem. We need to discern when we are confronting something truly new (a technology that may revolutionize our world, for example) or something that is, mostly, just better wine in new wineskins. If we overreact to the new, we find ourselves believing that we need to reinvent everything; if we lock onto what we (think we) already understand, we are likely to miss at least some important opportunities.

There is a third option, one that is the least effective. As Alvin Toffler (1984) suggested in Future Shock, we can simply freeze, like deer in the headlights.To avoid such a reaction, we need to develop the intuition that enables us to sense what is truly new about the new, and the wisdom to recognize what is still valid about the old.

This issue reflects the yin and yang of change and stability. Our lead article is the annual R&D Trends survey, which seeks to anticipate shifts in investment intent and focus of those leading R&D organizations. The introduction to this year’s survey, which was conducted in the summer of 2022, summarizes the findings: “While not as optimistic as last year’s respondents, this year’s respondents showed expectations similar to the pre-pandemic period. . .with increased spending overall and increases in [anticipated] staffing.” Optimism persists amid what can only be described as significant post-COVID, geopolitical, supply chain, technological, and political uncertainty. The issues tech leaders are most concerned with, however, are remarkably familiar: balancing the short term and the long term, attracting the necessary talent, and building an innovation culture. Though familiar, all of these issues have new twists in the post-COVID, remote work world.

The growth/stability dichotomy also plays out for individual technologies; they develop in exponential ways and go through cycles at the same time. AI has had several “AI winters,” for example, each of which followed a period of tremendous hype. Early in my career, I was part of the knowledge-based system revolution, which focused on painstakingly eliciting knowledge from expert practitioners and encoding it in symbolic processing systems. Expert Systems had great success in some sectors, but the AI was only 15 percent of the solution. Failure often came about because developers didn’t engage with the other 85 percent—the human and organizational integration issues.

As Tom Davenport discusses in our Conversations interview, advances in neural network technology have created a new path to intelligent systems—one based on creating intelligent answers to difficult problems from large training sets and huge computing power. As Davenport notes, two things are consistent between these systems and the generation that preceded them: the need to design a partnership between the intelligent systems and the people they support, and the importance of focusing on the non-AI issues in driving success.

New technologies get a lot of attention, but researchers continue to introduce new innovation methods, as well. Early successes using these methods create excitement, which is often followed by frustration as others, in different contexts, seek to apply them. Crowdsourcing, is one methodology that has demonstrated significant potential, particularly in software solutions, and we are now in the phase of broadening its use. As Ademir Vrolijk and Zoe Szajnfarber discuss in their paper “The Opportunists in Innovation Contests,” success requires identifying exactly whom to attempt to attract to your problem and how to attract them. Their paper identifies “opportunists” as a critical audience. They define opportunists as those who have the skills to solve our problem and who see the contest as a vehicle for demonstrating their skills in order to build their career. The method is new; the motivations of technical participants are familiar.

Those leading innovative organizations can sometimes feel as if they are a child playing in the waves, struck from behind by a new wave before they have really regained their footing after the last one. Such was the feeling of CTOs who participated in the 2022 IRI CTO Forum. They are confronting a cascade of new threats and opportunities even as the older ones have not yet played out. Their challenge is how to manage in this new VUCA world, one filled with Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. Where should they find new ways of operating, and where can they rely on the skills that they have built throughout their career?

The key takeaway from the CTO Forum, and from several articles in this issue, is that we will have to learn to manage in the VUCA world because it is likely to continue. Effective management principles are, largely, the same, but the pace feels new. To many, there seems to be a quantitative difference in pace and complexity that, at some point, will require a qualitative difference in how we manage. At that point, everything really will be new—and the old practices an impediment, not an asset. As my kids used to ask, “Are we there yet?”

Research-Technology Management seeks submissionsCALL FOR PAPERS: Special Issue: Accelerating Innovation: Capabilities and Systems

Research-Technology Management is seeking submissions for a special issue on initiatives that are accelerating innovation.

Guest Editors:

–– Lead Editor: Prof. Mats Magnusson, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm

–– Dr. Susanne Nilsson, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm

–– Prof. Mikael Samuelsson, University of Cape Town, South Africa

–– Dr Paola Bellis, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

This special issue is in collaboration with the 2023 Innovation and Product Development Management Conference being held June 8–9, 2023, in Lake Como Italy. The conference will host a Special Track to present papers submitted for this call. All papers submitted to IPDMC will received feedback from SI guest editors and an experienced team to improve their quality before authors submit them to RTM. There are two ways to submit manuscripts. Please note the different timelines.

To IPDMCExtended Abstract for presentation @ IPDMC (optional): January 12, 2023Full paper for presentation @ IPDMC (optional): April 1, 2023IPDMC 2023 (presentations for pre-submission feedback, optional): June 7–9, 2023 in Lecco, Lake Como, ItalyFull Paper Submission Deadline: September 15, 2023Publication Issue: March–April 2024Directly to RTMSubmission Deadline: September 15, 2023Peer Review: December 2022 to November 15, 2023Publication Issue: March–April 2024

Current global challenges and the unprecedented page of change have created an urgent need to accelerate innovation. New opportunities exist to create novel and potentially disruptive product-service systems and business models to tackle these issues. Organizations in all industries are under pressure to transform and develop new capabilities and skills in innovation. Companies tend to underestimate what it takes to make their innovation efforts successful, especially when they seek to generate more radical, disruptive, or transformative innovations. Innovation initiatives tend to be fragmented, ad hoc, and episodic. Emerging research suggests a need exists for approaches that are more holistic, systematic, and sustainable over time, to build longer-lasting innovation capabilities

Innovators and R&D experts may need to design completely new ecosystems by cooperating across industries and engaging with startups. Collaboration in diverse sectors and emerging markets/economies may enable systemic innovation solutions that solve problems and create value for a range of stakeholders. We are actively seeking papers on the following topics:

Competencies/capabilities companies need to accelerate digital and sustainable innovation.

Ecosystems companies are building—for example, platform-based, capstone firm driven, or network-based—to enable systemic innovation and the forms of governance used to influence the speed and outcome of innovation

Cross-boundary collaborations with startups, academia, public organizations, and NGOs that are influencing the management of innovation, speed of innovation, and systemic innovation.

Corporate innovation management systems that are being designed to meet the demand for digital, sustainable, and systemic innovations.

Reverse innovations taking place in different industries and how the lack of resources and established infrastructure in emerging markets are shaping them.

How the new ISO 56002 standard is being used to design corporate innovation management systems and how the implementation of such systems influences organizations’ ways-of-working and practices; how the adoption of ISO 56002 influences knowledge transfer and what implications it has for innovation management.

RTM articles are concise and practice oriented. Submissions should demonstrate companies’ experiences, what’s changing, adaptations, and managerial lessons learned/practical implications. Ideal submissions offer concrete examples and data to support their topic. Successful submissions will offer readers practical information they can put to work immediately.

We prefer submissions at around 4,000–4,500 words. We will occasionally publish truly groundbreaking pieces as long as 5,000 words. Articles should be submitted via our Editorial Manager system at http://www.editorialmanager.com/rtm/. For submission requirements and author’s guidelines, visit www.tandfonline.com/urtm. Email questions to RTM’s managing editor, Tammy McCausland, at [email protected].

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jim Euchner

Jim Euchner is editor-in-chief of Research-Technology Management. He previously held senior management positions in the leadership of innovation at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, Pitney Bowes Corporation, and Bell Atlantic. He holds BS and MS degrees in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Cornell and Princeton Universities, respectively, and an MBA from Southern Methodist University. Jim is the author of Lean Startup in Large Organizations: Overcoming Organizational Resistance (Productivity Press 2022). [email protected]