Driven to Discovery
America's Culture of Innovation
Welcome to Infophilia, a weekly newsletter about the human love of information. This is one of the places where I’m pioneering a positive psychology of information, an avant-garde research project. I am shining a light to deepen our understanding for living well. To that end, I believe in transparency—like sharing the prompts behind my AI-generated images, as I’ve done today. Thank you for joining me on this journey. You, my readers, come from many fields, and keep me inspired to find new ways of bringing different information realities to life. I appreciate you taking the time to read. Please feel free to send any feedback or suggestions. For now, I'm glad you're here, and I hope you enjoy this issue's insights!
Last week, I highlighted a public service leader’s imagination and innovation. Today, we delve into the culture of innovation.
Some housekeeping first:
I delayed delivery of this week’s edition of Infophilia by a day in order to honor my Dad’s innovation and entrepreneurship.
I’m going back to Notes instead of Endnotes. When listening on the Substack app the AI text to speech reading the note numbers just doesn’t make sense!
Now, today’s story.
[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries. U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.
Technoscience – scientific progress enabled by technology – is the force behind innovation, entrepreneurship, and advancement in America. These robust cultural values have fueled economic growth, societal change, and the global spread of Silicon Valley and American ideology. But technology both shapes and is shaped by culture.
The United States of America depends on innovation. Enshrined in Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, creativity and invention are literally our founding values and the patent system was designed to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” Three social roles — inventors, entrepreneurs, and engineers — were critical for the early industrialization of the USA. While the three roles are often distinct, people like Thomas Edison embodied the inventor-entrepreneur ideal. The US, history shows, nurtures a rich number of inventor-entrepreneurs and is the undisputed world leader. The founders of the USA thought it was critically important to legally protect and reward innovations. They enabled inventors to profit from inventions that shaped society. This required extensive collaboration, teaming creative minds like Edison with diligent engineers to integrate and diffuse innovations. Government initiatives provided early support, including land grants. A majority of the early American inventors were from the middle class; many had also experienced poverty.
During industrialization a unique American conception of “technology” emerged,