Being able to waste plays an important part in evolution. Females prefer the males that can waste, in theory. Waste here means ownership of something not required for survival, a longer than necessary tail in birds for instance.
Anders Møller found out that male swallows with artificially lenghtened tails were preferred more by female swallows [1]. There are theories to explain this, generally around the following lines: if you can survive AND afford to waste, you must be good. This doesn't apply to human females of course, no expensive diamonds or champagne can sway their minds ;)
Companies always try to avoid waste, probably rightly so. In Innovator's Dilemma however, Clayton M. Christensen pointed out that our very successful companies have a tendency to focus on their most successful products, direct most resources to these and thus risk losing their ability to innovate. This effect makes them efficient companies but sometimes make them dinosaurs.
Waste is bad, there is no question about it. On the other hand, if I somehow combine the above two paragraphs, I come to the conclusion that maybe if directed wisely, waste can accelerate technological innovation. Let's think how credible this argument is. A good starting point is the rules of economic efficiency:
- No one can be made better off without making someone else worse off.
- More output cannot be obtained without increasing the amount of inputs.
- Production proceeds at the lowest possible per-unit cost.
These are all valid points when processes and technologies used in production are all stable, and thus production operates within the limitations of status-quo. This is all good, but there is a theoretical limit that a company will hit by making stuff more efficient. To reach beyond that point, innovation will be needed.
Arguably, investing in innovation will lead to some waste in the system. That is because randomness seems to play part in innovation process. You can read more in The Randomness of Corporate Innovation, here's a quick finding:
“The most effective innovations are the result of formal product development teams in less than 50 percent of cases. The rest of the time, effective innovations stem from rogue inventors or “under the radar” skunk works.”. This obviously doesn't mean innovation is fully random, but there is some randomness factor in it. You can read more on this topic in The Rules of Innovation.
Some companies realize this and have official schemes trying to boost innovation at the risk of creating some waste. Google's famous 20 percent time to engineers is one of them. W.L. Gore is another company which implements such schemes. One can argue, these are all waste because engineers could be working on defined projects for current products during the time freed for them. On the other hand, that would make the companies more efficient, but maybe less innovative.
So there is an interesting relation between innovation, efficiency and waste. This probably is a result of randomness, or the partly random nature of innovation. Well, maybe female swallows weren't irrational after all: ability to waste could be an important asset.
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Photo credit: cdbtx
[1] Møller, 1988
