Linking science and innovation

Innovation needs technology to lead science, and product development to lead research

Popular belief says scientific research leads to discoveries, these discoveries enable the development of new technology, and this new technology feeds into production and the market.  This mental model, the linear model of innovation, is attractively simple, but dangerously simplistic.  Scientific research actually has a very limited role in industrial innovation.

Technology aims to expand the realm of practical human possibility. Science aims to attain an enhanced understanding of nature. The distinction is not so much in what is done but why. Utility is at the heart of technology, or engineering.  Knowledge may result from a new development, but that’s not