Why it is hard to adopt sustainable technologies?

Part II

Sustainable technologies take into account negative externalities and cause nil negative externalities upon nature, vulnerable societies or living beings. Alternately, they maximize positive externalities upon the entities mentioned above. In general, sustainable technologies are for common good than for private good at the expense of common good.

Due to the above-mentioned reasons, development of sustainable technologies is complex, requires expertise from many diverse fields and development & dissemination efforts are high. Needless to say, risks associated with failure are also higher.

How do we mitigate risks while formulating research proposals?

Scientific pursuit of sustainable technologies from research to development can be guided by the principles of scientific inquisitiveness, engineering skills and entrepreneurial network formation skills.

What are the ways to include all the three in a research project, particularly, in a team of scientists, technologists and innovators?

1. Innovators must follow the Ockham’s razor, a problem-solving principle, which states that when presented with multiple hypotheses, obvious solution is the one with least assumptions. As a corollary, in a proposal, there may not be more assumptions than facts.

2. There may not be any digression in the research proposal. There shall not be even secondary or tertiary objectives, howsoever, tempting; the possibilities of the outcomes of the objectives were to be.

3. There shall be no magnifying global facts into local situations. Instead, demonstrate and highlight local facts in a microscopic approach.

4. The innovator must be equipped with the engineering skills to visualize together the right ‘lego’ blocks in the input-output chain till the actual user.

5. The innovator must be equipped with the entrepreneurial ability to pull together the right ‘lego’ blocks from different networks seamlessly.

Even after 8 centuries after Ockham stated the principle, it is very much relevant today in the era of abundance of data, enabled by easier creation and access to data through internet, which need not be, and very often the case, verified facts. Hence, what one sees as facts is assumption. It may be concluded that localized, easily verified data shall be part of the proposal. (It is another matter that it is very difficult to get local data than global data through internet).

How else one may acquire verifiable and credible data? This will be beyond the scope of this discussion. However, intuitive prediction and analysis based on probabilistic estimates may be near-accurate method of data usage.

Research of naturally occurring substances, phenomenon and development of substances may often have multiple potential applications. While it is practical to have multiple applications, in a strictly focused applied research, it is desirable and prudent to have a single focus and primary objective and any secondary objective shall not be encouraged. A serial approach to research may keep one focused.

There is a top-down approach to signify the magnitude of a situation. For instance, an approach to research is based on the premise that there is a 30% food waste globally. Does this mean that every household wastes 30%, every food market wastes 30%? No, it may not be. For instance, some portion of the vegetable waste as droppings during loading/unloading in a market has a customer segment at a different price point. Hence, global estimates may not accurately demonstrate the local situation.

The alternate approach is to aggregate local situations to solve comprehensively through local solutions, instead of applying global solution for a disparate local problem. Hence, a research proposal may start with local scenario and work towards a solution that will change it into a desired state.

The last 2 guidelines are more desirable than necessary for an innovator. Engineering and entrepreneurial skills are about putting networking of components, technologies and all types of capital in a seamless flow of input to output till it reaches the user from the producer.

In short and summary, research endeavors that are simple and with least assumptions are more likely to succeed.