The 1973 oil embargo transforms decades of solar energy research into profitable investments. Photovoltaic cells, developed by Bell Labs in 1954 then adapted for satellites, find their terrestrial market in crisis. Scarcity reveals the latent value of innovations that were waiting for their economic moment.
The prediction of future scarcity modifies present profitability calculations. Innovation does not respond to existing demand,it bets on coming impossibility.
Crisis unlocks technological reserves built up while awaiting a change in context. Laboratories accumulate solutions for problems that have not yet reached their economic urgency. The Cold War finances electronic miniaturization for armaments; the personal computer inherits these investments thirty years later.
Each drawer that opens had waited twenty years. Lithium-ion batteries emerge in the 1990s when portable electronics anticipate the limits of nickel-cadmium. Innovation follows the projection of future constraints, not their present manifestation.
Doctrine
Research accumulates solutions awaiting their economic problems. Innovation anticipates impossibility rather than responding to demand.
Vecteur ouvert
If innovation systematically anticipates its obstacles, what becomes of innovation that arrives too early? Do technologies exist that definitively miss their activation window and become obsolete before being used?
