Paradigm Wars

Technology companies are engaged in paradigm wars. By their very nature, wars are wasteful and destructive.

In the 1960s, Thomas Kuhn, an obscure professor of the history of science, wrote a modest volume entitled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, whose subject was how scientific “knowledge” evolves. The development of physics from Ptolemy to Copernicus to Galileo to Newton to Einstein was one of his many examples.

The book had an unexpected, far-reaching impact on numerous disciplines, including business, because Kuhn explained how, at any point in time, there is a prevailing view of things that determines what is accepted as truth. The paradigm has only a partial basis in rational sciences, whereas the other part is “an apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident” that is “always a formative ingredient of the believes espoused by a given scientific community at a given time.” Substitute the word market for scientific community and you can understand why Kuhn is also germane to business.

A new paradigm is born when the prevailing paradigm cannot explain a certain phenomenon and a new one is offered that explains it better, though not necessarily completely. Typically the founding of a new paradigm is attributed to a single individual, but, as Kuhn notes, a paradigm change is “intrinsically a revolutionary process that is seldom completed by a single man and never overnight.” As Galileo found out the hard way, new paradigms receive strong resistance from “the specialists on whose area of special competence they impinge,” because the new paradigm “implies a change in the rules governing the prior practice” and “reflects on much scientific work they have already successfully completed.” Reflects negatively, we can assume. If the new paradigm can muster enough credibility to overcome the skepticism, a new paradigm is established.

The thoughts of the individual founder are recorded for posterity and codified into a body of knowledge. When the founder passes from the scene, what might be termed “normal puzzle solvers” follow. These people basically repeat the fundamental work of the innovator over and over again, making small iterative improvements to, not significant demarcations from, the conventional paradigm by which manner it becomes a credible, established discipline.

Kuhn’s thesis applies to almost every human endeavor (although he would surely deny he intended such universality), and the paradigm wars he describes prevail in industry as well. In the 1940s the economist Joseph Schumpeter, a seminal thinker on capitalism and entrepreneurship, coined the oxymoron “creative destruction” to describe the chaotic process of industrial change.

Paradigms make or break technologies and the companies that champion them. The prevailing paradigm creates an organized resistance to change. Kuhn notes that the ongoing refinement of the accepted paradigm leads to “professionalization” among the normal puzzle solvers and “an immense restriction of the scientist’s vision and to a considerable resistance to paradigm change.” Applying this to business, the normal puzzle solvers, often at a middle-level management and higher inside large companies, defend the prevailing paradigm either through direct hostility or lethargy. This should come as no surprise, because their power, influence, and incomes are derived from the knowledge of, and loyalty to, the prevailing paradigm.

Industrial history is the history of paradigm wars won and lost. Thomas Edison, advocating direct current for power transmission, lost the broad paradigm conflict to George Westinghouse, who advocated alternating current. In another paradigm conflict in electronics, germanium, a rare metallic element, defeated vacuum tubes. Within industries, smaller paradigm conflicts are constant. Silicon replaced germanium. Now silicon is under attack from gallium arsenide, which appears to move electrons more efficiently. On the horizon lurks another paradigm war when photon-based optic devices exist that can replace electron-based devices like transistors; beyond those waits superconductivity. You must understand where you company fits in the paradigm wars. You are fighting whether you know it or not. Your company is a rebel army. The only reason you exist is to promote a new way of doing things: a new process, technique, form factor, material, architecture. If you offered nothing new, you would not exist. Larger companies do the old things.

Paradigm wars cost time and money, the most limited resources in a small high high-tech company. It takes money to develop the product, educate and persuade potential buyers, and gear up for production. The more entrenched is the prevailing paradigm, the more time and money it will take to defeat it. Frequently fighting the paradigm war will cost more in marketing expenditures than developing the technology itself. The companies who espouse the prevailing paradigm will always be bigger and better financed. For them, too, the stakes are high: careers, profitability, and image. A small company with a product that will change an industry should anticipate a protracted and expensive struggle. The cost will be directly proportional to the size of the opportunity.

The good news is that a competitor may be too entrenched in the old paradigm to change. The bad news is that so may be potential customers. Many times the paradigm has been institutionalized, in which case suppliers and customers collaborate to protect he old paradigm as an industry standard.

Paradigm conflicts do not always express themselves as resistance to change from Luddite managers inside stodgy, big companies. The conflicts also arise from end users. Sectors of agribusiness eagerly anticipated the approval of bovine somatotropin (BST), a hormone that increases milk production in cows by 20 percent. But the hormone has been rejected by its potential beneficiaries. Consumers worry it will cause mutations in children. Animal-rights activists think the cows are being abused. Farmers worry the increased production will disrupt the market equilibrium and send numerous farmers to bankruptcy. BST is the product of an industry which has expended $1 billion since 1980 to support over 5000 researchers. Thus far this effort has produced no net return on investment.

This is an introductory section from Adamson's book Walking the High-Tech High Wire: The Technical Entrepreneur's Guide to Running a Successful Enterprise. I found it to be a useful review of Kuhn's paradigm concept in the context of a new healthcare start-up I'm a part of.

Rereading it, however, got me to thinking about the same topic in a political context. Significant change in politics is also a Kuhnian paradigm shift. As Machiavelli pointed out, there are always people with a vested interest in the past, but as Kuhn points out, this vested interest is not necessarily financial or power-oriented, but may be "computational". Over time people build or acquire internal representations and inference methods that enable them to think about the world and solve problems in it. The "FDR paradigm" sets people up to think that government can make them prosperous. The "Reagan paradigm" sets people up to think that government is what's keeping them from being prosperous.

As I remember Kuhn, new paradigms take over either when the keepers of the old paradigm retire/die off, or when the new paradigm becomes so successful that all the new scientists naturally take to it. What could be the political success story that will make the next generation of Americans gravitate to a new, non-socialist political paradigm?

Actually it is not true that Kuhn meant his notion of "Paradigm Shift" to be applied outside of Science. He was particularly talking about the nature of theory and empiricism in the context of scientific methodology or emerging scientific methodology. To apply this to say, styles of music, is to miss his point. That point being that when empirical evidence invalidates theory or forces it into difficult convolutions then a new theory will arise provided that their is enough data and, by implication the right sort of observational and experimental equipment.

Kuhn sure had an interesting idea.

Anyway...
"What could be the political success story that will make the next generation of Americans gravitate to a new, non-socialist political paradigm?"

I assume that by "socialist political paradigm" you mean (centralized) state administration of the economy. One way to get away from that paradigm might be by a massive failure of that paradigm (Social Security?)

But to look at the bright side, maybe it will be surpassed by the idea that we can cooperate and be nice without the threat of being put in jail for tax evasion. The free software movement may serve to shift the paradigm.

I think the socialist state gets a lot support because people think that the state is what unites us. Maybe it will become apparent that the state is what divides us (Democrats vs. Republicans for example). There are a lot of ways that Americans are trying to improve the country outside of the political system. This makes the politicos nervous. Something needs to break down the barriers that they have established. The Internet?

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