[Info-vax] Innovating in innovation: the oldest to the rescue of the newest

[gérard Calliet]

Will you allow an incursion into very theoretical considerations? I
think sometimes they can help. I am trying to explain my strong
motivation to participate in the renewal of VMS, and how I believe that
this renewal does not only cross my personal ramblings but is on the
contrary representative of existing currents. And also to explain on
what my appreciations of the moment are based. Finally, it seems to me
that after nearly six years of hard work the renewal of VMS is entering
a crisis, and I have an analysis of it that I hope will be encouraging.
End of the prologue.

Everyone knows about the "errare humanun est, perseverare diabolicum
est", or the "what was, that will be, nothing new under the sun".
If we stay at the simplest level, it seems that repetition is both the
most common and the most sterile thing.

But if we pay a little more attention, we realize that it is because we
limit ourselves to repeating our mistakes that nothing new happens.

Biblical tradition correlates novelty and the lunar month. Synagogue
children will tell you that this is a classical teaching, the verse
quoted implies something else: nothing changes under the sun, but the
moon renews itself every month, and if we know how to do this, we can
create fruitful newness from the very bosom of repetition.

To put it another way, transposing this into more industrial terms,
innovation is not linear but helical, where we may be going in circles,
but rising with each turn. Anyone who does not agree to go back in a
circle, and so to take the past in a positive light in order to reshape
it for the future, and who naively believes in a linear progression
towards the future, is condemned to do nothing but stand still.

To innovate in innovation is precisely to move from linear time to
helical time.

It is this type of analysis that has led me to say from the outset that
the takeover of VMS is eminently innovative, and has a very great future
ahead of it.

This week I attended a conference in France organized by an
inter-university and institutional network and supported by
industrialists, the title of which is an illustration of this type of
idea: « Imagining the future from the past »
(https://says.univ-littoral.fr/?page_id=736)  (Sorry, French-Canadian
and all speechs in french).

The existence of colloquia of this kind throughout the world is the
proof that something new is happening in industrial thinking on innovation.

By way of example, I will give the references of one of the speakers -
from whom I am using the exact wording "helical" - whose all ideas we
are not entitled to share, but who is truly recognized at the highest
level in the international industrial and academic community on the
management of industrial innovation.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navi_Radjou)

This Franco-American of Indian origin draws the strength of his thought
and action from Indian cultural references. For my part, I have just
given biblical references. No wonder: if the basic reasoning indicates
that there are forces to be found in the past, therefore why not in the
very ancient past.

The strength of the return of VMS is, in my opinion, isomorphic to this
type of innovation based on cycles.

But we must take the measure of two common errors that still threaten
and are also present for the renewal of VMS.

The belief in a voluntarist linearity for innovation, which moves too
quickly towards a glimpse of the future, without giving itself the
strength to draw on the very foundation of its movement, which is first
and foremost a return movement.

The thoughtless repetition of all that is inherited.

It seems to me that VSI has fallen into both of these errors. Flight
forward with the rising sun x86. Diabolical return of some of the bad
habits of Digital and HP.

It's not impossible that it's because of some naivety that VSI fell into
these common traps. The belief in immediate and hyperbolically
profitable innovation is still a very common belief, and one can
associate its enthusiasm with it without being careful. The fall back
into bad practices can be made with good will by thinking that "old
recipes are always the best" - which is *almost* true.

But also it often happens that the heroes of an adventure don't realize
how valuable is what they are doing. The VMS ecosystem has not yet
appreciated the value of his gesture of recovery, and is therefore
unable to find support for it in contemporary movements that are
isomorphic to it, like everything I have just very quickly outlined as
an innovation in innovation.

Perhaps the criticism is too harsh and the fear unfounded.

Let us imagine, however, that there is some truth in my proposals.
The consequence would be that the crisis would be blamed on a false
start. This false start would probably have been inevitable. Beginnings
are difficult and restarts are certainly even more so. There would still
be a work of re-timing and search for resonance to be done, to adjust
our wishes for the future to the cycles that are actually able to
receive them, and to understand how our adventure is related to
contemporary bottom waves.

Let's put it differently: VSI you are not alone, your project can join
everything that is (re)built solid today. I predict that in a few years
we will have laudative analyses in MIT Sloan journal.

(Provided we listen to visionaries like yours truly, of course 😊 ).

Let’s put it again differently. Any kind of difficulties, any weight of
problems don’t disqualify the very nature of the project. But perhaps it
has to be confronted with more analysis aspects, rethinking its
conditions of possibility, very nature of its first, second and long
term market segments (each at their own pace), reevaluating which
strengths (intellectual, industrial, human involvment) could help. I
have to say on my side that understanding there are important trends in
universities and industries similar with our approach has been a very
positive experience.

To conclude, and in the style of classical hermeneutics, which is useful
to let  people say what they have to say about what they quote, we can
interpret "what was, that will be" as the greatest assurance: what was
under the DEC sun will be under the VSI sun (fruitful, fruitful).

To future success,

Gérard Calliet