Unchaining Innovation

摘要: Building on the previous chapter’s analysis of how objectives can derail educational systems, this chapter expands the argument against objectives to innovation as a whole. In particular, the focus is on examining how obsession with objectives can harm science funding, collaborative innovation, business investment, and artistic discovery. The problem is that in all of these disparate areas, objectives can stifle genuine creativity, but in many cases objectives remain the sole device for encouraging productivity. It’s clear that setting an arbitrary invention or scientific discovery as an objective does not guarantee that the objective is likely or possible to be reached. Yet at first glance it might seem unlikely that there are credible alternatives to objectives across a broad spectrum of systems of innovation. However, as with education, there are indeed practical non-objective alternatives that take into account the …