Technological vs. Social Innovation and the Efficiency Paradox

Conventional wisdom suggests technology innovation is the key to unlocking solutions to the sustainability problem statement; history may provide lessons to the contrary.

Social innovation notwithstanding, in an 1865 book The Coal Question, William Stanley Jevons pontificated about sustainability related issues like carrying capacity and limits to growth. Jevons indicted technological innovation for the surge in resource consumption in 19thcentury UK. Using the steam-engine as the embodiment of technology innovation of the day, Jevons discussed how it increased coal energy efficiencies by exponential factors. Despite increased efficiencies, resource consumption exploded. According to Jevons, "whatever conduced to increase the efficiency of coal, and to diminish the (opportunity) cost of its use, directly tended to augment the value of the steam-engine, and to enlarge the field of its operations." This has become known as Jevons' Paradox.

The parallels between Jevons' Paradox and the modern "resource efficiency" paradigm are striking. Conventional logic suggests that technological innovation will improve the tools and methodologies mankind puts to use in adapting to his changing world. As such innovations on products and processes improve efficiencies, demands on input capitals will be reduced below replenishment rates; sustainable by definition. But Jevons' Paradox makes deeper system connections between technological innovation and growth; it asks us to quit ignoring historical examples of innovation-driven efficiencies as a precursor to greater, not reduced, resource consumption. Although counterintuitive, when efficiencies increase, resource consumption increases almost invariably.

Our society's fascination with technology may spring forth from the engineering mindset which has become synonymous with the Industrial Revolution. In the words of Aldo Leopold, "we began to believe that a constructed mechanism is inherently preferable to a natural one." It became a uniquely American source of pride to tame and control the wild morass that extended between our oceans. Yet this love affair with technological innovation, embedded in the American DNA, may pose our greatest threat to humanity, by underscoring a hubris and lack of humility before the natural world.

Social innovation takes its cues from social biomimicry (http://jm.ly/I5KxNi) where we learn not from human engineered, but naturally evolving communities. Most often, it is not technological adaptation that has sustained these communities through eons, but adaptations in the relationships and symbioses among and between species and their environments.

Janine Benyus says, "it may not be a technological awakening, but an awakening of the heart that leads to our biomimetic future." Despite technological progress, it is our social investments which generate compounding positive impacts for cultures and communities. Social innovation may be the awakening of the heart she was referring to.