Innovation Policy Colloquium: Andrew Torrance

The Innovation Policy Colloquium focuses each year on different aspects of the law’s role in promoting creativity, invention, and new technology. This year, we will discuss the the implications of complexity for law and policy related to innovation, privacy and AI. Complexity science is a cutting-edge multi-disciplinary field that studies a wide variety of systems comprised of numerous interacting components. The human social network, the internet, social media applications, cities, biological systems and financial networks are all examples of complex systems. Complexity can lead to non-linear and surprising responses to policy initiatives, such as tipping points and feedback effects. Policymaking that is insensitive to these possibilities can go drastically awry.

Andrew Torrance, Associate Dean of Graduate and International Law; Paul E. Wilson Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Kansas School of Law
How Innovation Hypercycles Trigger Technology and Power Prosperity

Abstract: Unlike other kinds of animals, which repetitively innovate without sustained progress, humans have accomplished cumulative innovation. Throughout human history technological innovation has played a key role in advancing welfare and progress by expanding the production possibilities frontier. Once capital and labor inputs are exhausted, economic growth derives from technological innovation. In the long run, technological innovation tends to occur at a moderate pace. However, every once and a while, when conditions are right, a period of explosive technological advancement arises, creating an “innovation hypercycle”. Hypercycles are cycles whose component parts are themselves cycles (that is, cycles of cycles). First discovered in chemistry, then in biology, innovation hypercycles also give rise to “hot spots” of rapid technological growth. These hypercycles are fueled by the replication of ideas, applications of those ideas, growth in human wealth and welfare, and increases in the talent pool, leading to yet more ideas, and repeating the cycle. When driven by an innovation hypercycle, technological growth accelerates rapidly. Several factors are crucial to the success of innovation hypercycles. They may be combined into the backronym “FORWARD”, which stands for freedom, openness, restlessness, wonderlust, audacity, rationality, and democracy. These factors include open-mindedness, contestability of ideas, widespread education, freedom of thought and speech, free trade in goods, services, and ideas, and an outlook focused on the future. Innovation hypercycles may be poisoned into decline or destruction by such contrasting values as closed-mindedness, orthodoxy, dogmatic reliance on received wisdom, ignorance, censorship, autocracy, barriers to trade, and a backwards and past-worshiping orientation. Intellectual property and regulation, while potentially beneficial, can also hinder innovation, if misapplied, creating barriers rather than opportunities. Discussed are grand innovation hypercycles ancient Sumeria, classical Greece, Song Dynasty China, and the Industrial Revolution, local innovation hypercycles Renaissance Florence, Silicon Valley, and Kendall Square, institutional innovation hypercycles the School of Alexandria, the House of Wisdom, and the Cavendish Laboratory, and purposive innovation hypercycles the Manhattan Project and the Human Genome Project. Innovation hypercycles are rare and delicate phenomena that require careful nurturing and protection to sustain. By understanding and wisely managing the factors that influence innovation hypercycles, society can generate and sustain technology hot spots that yield spectacular rates of innovation and enormous attendant social welfare gains.

Email Nicole Arzt if you would like to attend the colloquium. If you are outside of NYU and do not have an NYU Id then I will need to add your JRNY for building access.