When have you gone into an electronics store,
picked up a desirable gadget, and found that it was
labeled "Made in Russia"? Probably never. Russia,
despite its epic intellectual achievements in music,
literature, art, and pure science, is a negligible
presence in world technology. Despite its current
leaders' ambitions to create a knowledge economy, Russia
is economically dependent on gas and oil. In Lonely
Ideas, Loren Graham investigates Russia's long history
of technological invention followed by failure to
commercialize and implement. For three centuries, Graham
shows, Russia has been adept at developing technical
ideas but abysmal at benefiting from them. From the
seventeenth-century arms industry through
twentieth-century Nobel-awarded work in lasers, Russia
has failed to sustain its technological inventiveness.
Graham identifies a range of conditions that nurture
technological innovation: a society that values
inventiveness and practicality; an economic system that
provides investment opportunities; a legal system that
protects intellectual property; a political system that
encourages innovation and success. Graham finds Russia
lacking on all counts. He explains that Russia's failure
to sustain technology, and its recurrent attempts to
force modernization, reflect its political and social
evolution and even its resistance to democratic
principles. But Graham points to new connections between
Western companies and Russian researchers, new research
institutions, a national focus on nanotechnology, and
the establishment of Skolkovo, "a new technology city."
Today, he argues, Russia has the best chance in its
history to break its pattern of technological
failure.
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