Big Potatoes: the London manifesto for innovation

In Britain and America, the phrase ‘big potatoes’ is used to describe things or events that are deemed significant. Here is the English second edition

Here’s the preface to the Chinese edition, 2011. The FULL PDF version can be downloaded from the link below:

We have used the phrase because we think that, in the West, the significance of science and technology needs to be re-stated. In fact, our subtitle – The London Manifesto for Innovation – is a kind of ironic commentary on this point. In London, there are many innovations, but they are mainly in finance, and not nearly so much in science and technology.

In Britain and much of the West, it isn’t just banks who engage in new financial constructs. Mainstream companies – and especially those in services – prefer financial innovations to the much riskier business of investing in long-term research and development. Yet it is only penetrating R&D, and not this year’s new business model, that can create whole new sectors of wealth creation, and thus the millions and millions of jobs that the world needs.

Since Big Potatoes was first published, more warnings have been raised about the West’s lethargic conduct in innovation. In America, a book by the economist Tyler Cowen contends that, since 1970, weak scientific innovation – even in IT – has led to weak incomes in the US. [1] To this, the conservative cultural commentator David Brooks has added that technological change isn’t causing the slowdown, but a shift in values: as an ‘industrial economy’ has turned into an ‘affluent informationdriven world’, people ’embrace the postmaterialist mind-set’ because they can ‘improve their quality of life without actually producing more wealth’ – and, he hints, without producing more innovation. [2]

In fact, however, weak innovation is neither a simple problem of bad economic policy, nor a result of all-powerful technology pushing the West away from basic needs toward self-actualisation. [3] Science and technology used to enjoy support not just for economic reasons, but also for very proper political ones: it was felt right that mankind should learn and do more about nature. Similarly, today’s complacent attitudes toward science and technological innovation, and today’s preference for low-risk changes in personal behaviour and the idea of happiness, are traits that result not from technological advance, but from its deceleration, and, even more, from a broader failure of political audacity and will.

Big Potatoes believes that science and technology are dignified pursuits even without the millions of jobs they can create. But just as we object to those Western commentators who portray Chinese science and technology as purely imitative of Western developments, so we urge our Chinese readers to keep up the pressure for both continuous progress and major breakthroughs in science and technology.

In the light of the March 2011 explosions at nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, it is clear that the West needs the East’s scientific and technological experience more than ever. But whatever it still has to master or improve, China does not at all need the Western opium of distrust for science and technology.

Everybody needs to have faith in what mankind can learn and can achieve.

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To open and download the Full PDF version of the second edition, click on this ‘Big Potatoes: the London manifesto for innovation‘ link.