Was Steve Jobs really a genius?
Thoughts on the sources of innovation, and the role of the private and public sectors.
Hello and welcome back!
This week’s post marks part two in a series about innovation and its origins. This week I want to ask who drives innovation in our world?
Was Steve Jobs a genius?
Perhaps the most natural place to begin addressing this question is with the answer you already know.
In North America, and in liberal democracies more generally, we tend to think of innovation as stemming from the minds of singularly brilliant individuals. The stereotype of the lone wolf inventor ahead of his or her (usually his) time looms large in the public imagination. You probably already have a few in mind.
Steve Jobs. Bill Gates. Elon Musk.
Whatever your personal opinions on these figures, it’s safe to say our media tends to lionize these figures as the sole source of their companies’ successes. We think they are geniuses with the ability to predict and shape the future before it happens, and credit them with adding billions of dollars of value to our economies.
And to an extent, this version of the story is true.
When Steve Jobs revealed the iPhone in 2007, a sleek new kind of “smart phone,” the public was skeptical about his invention. Today, 61.4% of Americans own an iPhone and most can’t imagine their lives without them. Jobs and the team at Apple spent countless hours on painstaking engineering and business problems, often at great expense to their personal lives and well-being. Whether these sacrifices were worth it is open to interpretation, but there’s no question that Jobs’ leadership at Apple transformed the American tech landscape.
But there’s another version of Jobs’ story that gets told less often. In this version, Steve Jobs is still a groundbreaking inventor who created the iPhone and revolutionized the consumer technology landscape, but he didn’t invent it alone.
The Entrepreneurial State
In this version, we learn that the core technologies that made the iPhone the iPhone were created by government initiatives at agencies like NASA and DARPA. The iPhone could not have been as revolutionary as it was without the internet, GPS, and voice recognition technology, all of which were produced previously by government-funded and executed programs.
Economist Mariana Mazzucatto was the first to popularize this version of the events in her 2011 book The Entrepreneurial State. In it, Mazzucato makes the case that governments can and should take the lead on certain innovative projects to better serve the public interest, and enable the private sector to build on and scale these technologies. She also argues that we ought to reframe our understanding of America’s biggest corporate success stories to understand how public money, through cutting-edge government research institutions, enabled today’s biggest tech companies to thrive. Far from a story of bootstrap success, Apple’s innovation depended as much on Steve Jobs as it did on tax dollars, though the tax dollars Apple pays don’t seem to reflect that.
Here’s Mazzucato in her own words:
“While Steve Jobs was no doubt an inspiring genius worthy of praise, the fact that the iPhone/iPad empire was built on these State-funded technologies provides a far more accurate tale of technological and economic change than what is offered by mainstream discussions. Given the critical role of the State in enabling companies like Apple, it is especially curious that the debate surrounding Apple’s tax avoidance has tended to overlook this fact. Apple must pay tax not only because it is the right thing to do, but because it is the ultimate example of a company that requires the public purse to be large and risk-loving enough to continue making the investments that entrepreneurs like Jobs will later capitalize on.”
I first read The Entrepreneurial State in high school, and years later, its insights still feel relevant. Mazzucato does not romanticize the state or vilify the private sector. Rather, she makes e that when government agencies work well, they are uniquely positioned to rally resources around missions that benefit the public.
Typically, governments act this way in response to acute threats. It’s no coincidence that the government innovations that later helped Apple were invented as part of military technology programs. The DoD receives 45.8% of American research and development funding, compared to the National Institutes of Health, which receive 24.3%.
Recognizing this, Mazzucato argues that if governments want to see public challenges solved, they need to treat issues like climate change, pandemic response, and other key issues of our time with the same urgency as preventive military research, and lead the way in innovation. This could solve public problems faster and perhaps more efficiently than market-based solutions alone, which can take time to produce winning technologies and see market leaders emerge.
Mazzucato’s research flies in the face of this doctrine. If done right (and the if is important here), government research can produce real innovation, and potentially be better at it than private enterprise alone. This might be a controversial claim, but it’s worth considering.
Apple, at least, is evidence that it holds water.
So, who drives innovation? Whoever has the resources, the risk appetite, and the vision to make it happen.
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