Thinking of Science-Based Innovation

Abstract

In this book, the specific form of innovation work that is here called science-based innovation has been examined. Such innovations have their roots in the modest witnessing of pioneering scholars such as Copernicus, Galilei and Boyle, and over the years and in the course of time, scientific knowledge and scientific procedures have been developed into veritable machineries for innovation; one actually speaks of innovations—like managers and co-workers in the pharmaceutical industry actually do—derived from scientific expertise and procedures in terms of being distributed in pipelines. Such a leap from modest witnessing to pipeline thinking is not a linear or uncomplicated trajectory. In a famous scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, a bone is in a split second—collapsing a period of over 2 million years into one single moment—transformed into a space shuttle, thus locating oceans of time of the evolution from hominids to man’s development of advanced space technology in one single point of time. Even though the cinematographic medium allows us to perceive complicated evolutionary changes this way, in actual history there are no such smooth and seamless transitions.