9.6 Purifying Innovation and Technological Rejections

Marcos Antonio de Lima Filho, PhD.

In nature, because more DNA changes are harmful than beneficial, purifying selection plays an important role in maintaining the long-term stability of biological structures by removing deleterious mutations (Loewe, 2008). Natural selection is constantly sorting through the variation that mutations create, keeping the ones that work and getting rid of the ones that do not.

Likewise, without some sort of purifying selection, our built environment would be full of products and services cluttered with obsolete and useless features. Every day, companies come up with a surplus of new designs, but not all of these new features, technologies, goods, or services are able to deliver the promised benefits. When customers reject these “deleterious mutations” (Figure 9.6.1), they exert a negative selective pressure over the supply. Conversely, when consumers cannot choose, technologies tend to evolve in less-than-optimal directions because purifying selection can no longer correct erroneous paths.

Purifying selection is the mechanism responsible for removing deleterious mutations from a species. In the built environment, instead of random mutations, human creativity provides an unending source of new ideas upon which selection can operate. However, the process of technological evolution is suboptimal since supply and demand are constantly changing, and also because mistakes occur on both sides. The rejection of an emerging technology or a new feature is an example.

The evolution of smartphones and the history of commercial aviation both illustrate patterns of technological rejection. Figure 9.6.2 provides a summary of smartphone features that failed to achieve viable market diffusion. Features such as sensors to measure humidity, pulse rate, blood oxygen saturation, ambient temperature, and gestures were once integrated into smartphones, but were eventually discontinued due to low demand. For the majority of consumers, the additional costs and complexity of these components did not translate into any benefits.

Norman (2013) identifies several factors that drive companies to add new features: customer demands for more features and capabilities; competition, which pushes companies to match and surpass their competitors’ offerings; and market saturation, which can push companies to add new features in order to entice customers to upgrade. These factors can lead product designers to succumb to the temptation of cramming as many features as possible into a product. However, this approach often results in an unfocused product that, while providing a plethora of functions, fails to execute any single function well (Haskell, 2004).

This tendency towards growing complexity in product design is counterbalanced by the negative selection exerted by customers. This process involves buyers actively rejecting features that do not add significant value or enhance the user experience. Whereas positive selection fosters the adoption of new features, negative selection serves as a purifying force in product evolution, effectively filtering out unnecessary or detrimental features.

---

The Termination of The Concorde

Technological rejections ultimately result in the destruction of the value invested in them, which can be detrimental to their respective producers. Even so, purifying innovation tends to benefit society as resources are no longer wasted on useless or inefficient technologies. The discontinuation of supersonic air transport (SST), for example, benefited the environment because this mode of transportation is inherently wasteful. The Concorde and the Soviet TU-144 were both supersonic programmes that required enormous government subsidies during development, production, and operation.

Supersonic flight incurs a new penalty, that of wave drag; hence, the fuel consumed by SSTs per passenger mile is multiple times that of subsonic transports (Seebass, 1997). Despite this obstacle, there is renewed optimism about resurrecting supersonic transport. Low-sonic boom designs have been developed by startups such as Boom Supersonic, Virgin Galactic, Hermeus, and Exosonic, as well as NASA and Lockheed Martin. Although these projects will be more fuel-efficient than Concorde, the ICCT predicts that their fuel burn will be higher when compared to current subsonic aircraft:

(…) We project that airlines will be unable to operate SSTs profitably with overland flight restrictions or using e-kerosene. The SSTs investigated are expected to burn 7 to 9 times more fuel per seat-km flown than the subsonic baseline; combined with the high price of e-kerosene, this results in a 25-fold increase in the cost of fuel relative to subsonic aircraft operated on conventional fossil jet fuel (Rutherford et al., 2022).

The ICCT study also warns that “it is likely that supersonic aircraft will be operated on fossil fuels, not e-kerosene, in pursuit of profitability” (Rutherford et al., 2022).

These new supersonic endeavours will encounter the same obstacles that led to the termination of the Concorde programme. Even though the Concorde was a technological marvel, this highly subsidised program was a commercial disaster (Hamilton, 2021). Supersonic aircraft accounted for only 0,5% of all aircraft produced in the 1970s (as seen in Figure 4.4.6). Only 14 went into service, with the last Concorde being retired in 2003 (Crouch et al., 2020). At such low production levels, it was never going to be the saviour of the European aircraft industry; it was highly expensive to build and operate, and catered for relatively few people (Airbus, n.d.).

The cost of the Concorde programme was estimated to fall between 3.6 and 5.1 billion U.S. dollars in 1976 (Seebass, 1997). Accounting for inflation, these values would be equivalent to 17.6 and 25 billion dollars in 2022. The production cost per unit was so steep that it required the French and British governments to shoulder all development expenses. Both British Airways and Air France, then still state-owned, were given Concordes at little to no cost.