“Growing mangoes in Iceland”: How social media and online communities enable an antifragile and propitiously unpredictable innovation model

Online communities, in combination with innovation contests and social media, can create a context for ground-breaking innovation. Coalesced communications, accompanied by the long-standing "Hacker Ethic", and bolstered by the increasing prevalence of inexpensive tools such asthe 3D printer and Raspberry Pi, have re-invigorated an oldermodelof innovation whereby the tinkerer and hobbyist were positioned as a main source of invention. This paper states that this innovation model, following theideas of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, can be accurately described as “Antifragile”: i.e., it is not solely dependent on the success of one inventor, and can be geared to become stronger through the “failure” of individual projects and the sharing of data. Evidence is also presented which shows that this paradigm can also lead to "happy accidents", following Morton Meyers' assertion that "Three thingsare certain about discovery: Discovery is unpredictable. Discovery requires serendipity. Discovery is a creative act" (Meyers, 2011, p.24). For example, aninnovation contest in 2014 hosted by the online electronics engineering community element14 whose original intent was to create a new "networkedpollution sensor" instead enabled the development of a Carbon Monoxide detector for Latvian classrooms,a dust sensor for Singaporean streets, and an algal bloom detector for water supplies in the Philippines. As this example suggests, this paper also argues that setting ambiguous goals can inspire the aforementioned “happy accidents” that could potentially “grow mangoesin Iceland”; too tightly defined aims can diminish the potential for this form of innovation

Structuring information work: Ferranti and Martins Bank, 1952-1968

The adoption of large-scale computers by the British retail banks in the 1960s required a first-time dislocation of customer accounting from its confines in the branches, where it had been dealt with by paper-based and mechanized information systems, to a new collective space: the bank computer center. While historians have rightly stressed the continuities between centralized office work, punched-card tabulation and computerization, the shift from decentralized to centralized information work by means of a computer has received little attention. In this article, I examine the case of Ferranti and Martins Bank and employ elements of Anthony Giddens’s structuration theory to highlight the difficulties of transposing old information practices directly onto new computerized information work

Putting the spooks back in? The UK secret state and the history of computing

The post–World War II secret state (governmental bodies that handle national security, including signals intelligence, spying, counterintelligence, and some aspects of policing, as well as the central bureaucratic mechanisms of their control) is a lacuna in the history of UK computing. This article assesses the extent to which the UK secret state was a major user of computing technologies and examines the character of its computing tasks, as well as its relationships with industry and government, more broadly

Individual Inventors and Market Potentials: Evidence from US Patents

This paper examines the commercialization propensities of individual inventors' patents. Exploiting a peculiarity of the US patent system, concerning patent renewal fees in order to obtain small or large entity status, we are able to distinguish patents that become part of a large corporation's patent portfolio. Using an extensive dataset of US patents, both for domestic and foreign individual inventors, we find that patent characteristics, size of research teams, prior experience and past corporate patenting activity are positively associated with increased likelihood of transferring patent rights to large corporations

Silicon's Second World: Scarcity, Political Indifference and Innovation in Czechoslovak Computing, 1964-1994

How societies invent, adopt, adapt, distribute and innovate with computers is an important puzzle for historians of technology, economists, educators and government planners alike. This dissertation examines the developmental path of Czechoslovakia from when its premier computer scientist, Antonín Svoboda, emigrated in 1964 to slightly beyond state dissolution in 1993. An industrialized consumer society with little to consume, as Jaroslav Švelch noted, Czechoslovakia illustrates both the still-understudied history of computing in state socialist societies and the global story of innovation and adaptation in liminal spaces that provide human capital and emerging markets for the West. An alternate modernity emerged in what Martin Müller calls the 'Global East,' constituted by users living in scarcity, skeptical of state and capital power and maintaining the countercultural community values articulated by exponents like Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson and Buckminster Fuller. This work contributes to the ongoing turn in the history of technology away from Silicon Valley-centered narratives of invention toward the maintenance, adaptation and second-order innovation better representative of technological encounters globally. Czech and Slovak computer users are the focus: Their social origins, personal politics, creativity and negotiated autonomy framed the shape of computing in their country. Their stories are told often by themselves-in extensive oral interviews with key scientists, prominent dissidents and black marketeers-and in the pages of their community's magazines, journals and newsletters, in television interviews, in their jokes and ribald songs. Their voices are part of a global chorus of hobbyism, tinkering, maintenance and technological communities informed by scholars like Jaroslav Švelch, Melanie Swalwell, Honghong Tinn, Helena Durnová, Patryk Wasiak, Ksenia Tatarchenko and Nathan Ensmenger