INNOVATION RISK

• Autores: Robert C. Merton
• Localización: Harvard business review, ISSN 0017-8012, Vol. 91, Nº 4, 2013, págs. 48-56
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • New products and services are created to enable people to do tasks better than they previously could or do things they couldn't before. But innovations also carry risks. Just how risky an innovation turns out to be depends in great measure on the choices people make in using it. Attempts to gauge the riskiness of an innovation must take into account the limitations of the models-formal and informal-on which people base their decisions about how to use the innovation, warns Robert C. Merton, MIT professor and Nobel laureate in economics. Some models turn out to be fundamentally flawed and should be jettisoned, he argues, while others are merely incomplete and can be improved upon. Some models require sophisticated users to produce good results; others are suitable only to certain applications. And even when people employ appropriate models to make choices about how to use an innovation-striking the right balance between risk and performance-experience shows that it is almost impossible to predict how their changed behavior will influence the riskiness of other choices and behaviors they make, often in apparently unrelated domains. It's the old story of unintended consequences. The more complex the system an innovation enters, the more likely and severe its unintended consequences will be. Indeed, many of the risks associated with an innovation stem not from the innovation itself but from the infrastructure into which it is introduced. In the end, any innovation involves a leap into the unknowable. If we are to make progress, however, that's a fact we need to accept and to manage. INSETS: Ratings: Not the Whole Picture;Systemic Risk: When Three Rights Make a Wrong.