Jason Crawford, a prominent contributor in the progress studies space, recently wrote a piece talking about the need for a career path for invention. In it, he discussed how among the three major types of activity driving technological progress - science, invention, business - only invention was missing any social support structure, in the form of a career path. This (at least in part) results in the domain of invention being underserved, both by capital as well as by talent. Funding alone isn’t enough, Jason writes, because without a career path, there is no sense of progression (e.g. climbing the academic or corporate ladder). So we should look for ways to create career paths for invention to help with the stagnation of technological progress. But this feels a bit misguided to me.

A more or less repeatable process is required to build career paths. After all, that’s what a “path” is, a tried-and-true series of steps to follow to get an expected outcome. This is why some aspects of both science and business have career paths, because they both involve significant repeatable components. “Regular” (i.e. incremental) scientific research, as well as the day-to-day operations of a business are both fairly well-understood processes, with extensive documentation on the methodologies involved.

But I think invention, including the aspects in science and business that involve invention, is not like this. Its very nature, of creating something fresh and new from all that already exists, precludes it from being born from any repeatable process, beyond the super high level process of “throwing a lot of money at some really smart people and pray”. I mean, if we had a repeatable process to generate truly new inventions, we wouldn’t have a progress stagnation problem today (and I’d probably be writing this on Mars).

Lacking a repeatable process for invention does not mean that inventors are guaranteed to be one-hit wonders (although a large number of them are). There are many highly successful inventors, both individuals and groups, who have created multiple major inventions in their lifetimes. What it means is that the conditions for successful inventions are not clearly known and reproducible. Factors like individual brilliance, personality, historical context, and social environment probably all play a part, and these are not easily distilled down to a narrow career path to follow. Maybe increasing the funding and social status of inventors are the best we can do.