An interesting take on innovation: in this interview, historian David Edgerton maintains that we will not fully understand innovation unless we rethink the history of technology and its uses.

“Even as new technologies revolutionize everything from health care to media to warfare, it’s important to remember that our world runs primarily on products and technologies long in use — everything from aspirin to the internal combustion engine. In his new book, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, David Edgerton, the Hans Rausing Professor of Science, Technology, and Medicine at Imperial College London, argues for a new view of the history of technology that focuses not only on “Big Bang� innovations — Sony’s Walkman or a future spaceship that could carry humans to Mars — but also on incremental change and how societies use the technologies they invent or, just as important, borrow. As Edgerton writes, we must shift our focus “from the new to the old, the big to the small, the spectacular to the mundane, the masculine to the feminine, the rich to the poor.�

For more, see: “Technology and Its Discontents”, by Edward Baker

There was also a good review of Edgerton’s book (“What Else Is New? How uses, not innovations, drive human technology.” By Steven Shapin) in the special innovation-themed issue of the New Yorker earlier this summer.

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