Research Note

The Red Queen Effect and the Illusion of

Technology Acceleration
Richard Veryard
March 2010

Document Status
Work in progress. Comments welcome.

Introduction
I have always been wary of the common belief that technological change is
accelerating. I think this belief derives from a combination of proximity, selectivity
and distorted perception. I think we can sometimes be disproportionately
impressed by the glamour of recent technology, and misled by the commercially-
driven measures of intellectual property (such as volumes of patent activity and
product releases).
I am also wary of the supposed implications of this belief, in justifying (or
apparently making inevitable) a kind of pathological hyperactivity, as discussed
by Albert Borgmann in Crossing the Postmodern Divide.
Technology change is undoubtedly a major phenomenon of modern life, but it is
more complex and subtle than many commentators acknowledge, and the simple
models are based on illusion. In this paper, I hope to explore some of the issues
with this illusion.

Red Queen Effect

The Victorian mathematician and fantasist Lewis Carroll used the character of the
Red Queen to parody grotesque forms of reasoning and energy: believing
impossible things (before breakfast), running to remain stationary.

Believing the impossible, accelerating and relentless change - these are now
among the totems of innovation. The Red Queen has now become an icon for a
certain kind of energetic innovation.
The risk management consultant Bob Charette uses the related image of Running
Up the Down Escalator. i In one version of the story, the acceleration control is at
i
The SEI once offered a video with this title presented by Bob Charette. (I haven't seen this
video, but I've seen other materials derived from Charette's work that portray the staircase

Copyright © Richard Veryard 2010 Page 1

 Red Queen Effect

the top, so those who are most successful at running up the down escalator get
the chance to speed up the escalator, thus increasing the gap between
themselves and their competitors.ii

Theories of Acceleration
Raymond Kurzweil, Law of Accelerating Returns.
Charles Fine, Clockspeed.
Charles Fine (Clockspeed) argues that the pace of change (which he calls industry
clockspeed) varies quite significantly between different industries. Using Fine's
multi-dimensional approach to measuring clockspeed, it appears that in high
clockspeed industries substantial changes occur every 2 to 4 years, while in slow
clockspeed industries similarly substantial changes occur, on average, every 10 to
20 years.iii
In his book Adaptive Enterprise, Stephan H. Haeckel writes "Because the
information component of products can change faster, it will change faster.
Because information can be rapidly disseminated, it will be rapidly acquired by
others. As a result, product life cycles will continue to shrink, and the pace of
change will continue to accelerate." This statement looks like technological
determinism.
Dave Bayless has propounded a model of accelerating product innovation, which
he has named after the Red Queen.iv He points out that the compound effect of a
10% annual acceleration in product innovation results in a halving of product life
cycle duration every seven years. Bayless acknowledges that an industry's
average product life cycle is but one indicator of clockspeed and is, no doubt,
incomplete. Furthermore, proximity may very well distort our perception of
clockspeed, and, technological evolution may well be punctuated. Nevertheless,
he argues that a decrease in product life cycle is operationally
important–"variations and mutations" may not "be remembered in fifty years
time," but they are still important to individual businesses and their stakeholders.v

Types of innovation
Bayless chooses to define innovation as "launching new products". However, this
is not the only form of innovation that is important. For example, John Hagel
points out that process innovation can be as significant as product innovation.vi
However, it often seems that product innovations get more attention than process
innovations, and there may be an unconscious gender bias here. In his book, The
Myth of the Machine (pp 139-140), Lewis Mumford argues that technology can
bear both masculine and feminine characteristics. "The tool and the utensil, like
the sexes themselves, perform complementary functions. One moves,
manipulates, assaults; the other remains in place, to hold and protect and
preserve." The palaeolithic [i.e hunting/nomadic] inventions were more masculine
than feminine: fire, spears, arrows, etc. "The radical neolithic [i.e. farming]

as a corkscrew or helix, spiralling downwards as you try to run up.)

ii
http://thecriticalchain.blogspot.com/2008/06/good-bad-and-ugly-reality-of-risks-in.html
iii
http://swni.typepad.com/dispatches/2007/09/is-the-pace-of-.html
iv
For full references, see endnotes.
v
http://swni.typepad.com/dispatches/2007/09/is-the-pace-of-.html
vi
John Hagel, Product Innovation and the Red Queen Effect
http://edgeperspectives.typepad.com/edge_perspectives/2005/09/product_innovat.html.

Copyright © Richard Veryard 2010 Page 2

 Red Queen Effect

inventions were in the realm of containers.... The creation of moisture-proof, leak-

proof, vermin-proof clay vessels to store grain, oil, wine, and beer was essential to
the whole 'neolithic' economy."
We should not classify technology simply by the shape of the tool/utensil (pointed
tools are phallic; rounded or concave utensils symbolize breast or womb) but by
the processes they are intended for. "In general, the mobile, dynamic processes
are of male origin: they overcome the resistance of matter, push, pull, tear,
penetrate, chip, macerate, move, transport, destroy; while the static processes
are female ... and they remain largely in place, undergoing qualitative changes,
from raw meat to cooked meat, from fermenting grain to beer, from planted seed
to seeding plant.... Cooking, milking, dyeing, tanning, brewing, gardening are,
historically, female occupations.... All these functions necessarily enlarge the role
of containers: indeed are inconceivable without baskets, pots, bins, vats, barns".
In her book The Religion of the Machine Age, Dora Russell develops Mumford's
division of technology into masculine and feminine. She points out that most
people, when asked to think about technology, mostly think about the masculine
technologies and ignore the feminine ones.

Granularity of innovation
But I have a more fundamental concern with Bayless’s definition - if I don't know
exactly what counts as a "new product", then I don't know how to count them. If
this year's model has a slightly faster chip than last year's model, or a brushed
aluminium case, does that count as a "new product"? Let's say the iPod is a new
product, but is the iPhone really a new product, or just a fancy redesign of an old
product?
Lots of people in product development have a vested interest in labelling
everything as "new improved". Pharma companies spend a small fortune looking
for variations on existing drugs, so they can get patent protection for the "new"
formula. But if you take these descriptions at face value, you get a fundamentally
distorted view of the underlying technology change.

Innovation versus Maintenance

There is no shortage of activity in the IT industry, but much of this is simply
adding bells and whistles to existing inventions. Large software companies such
as Computer Associates apparently spend huge sums on R&D, but much of this is
consumed by the need to maintain and upgrade a large portfolio of software
products.
The 2004 R&D Scoreboard, issued by the UK Department of Trade and Industry,
contains a table of companies in the FT Global 500 with high R&D intensity
(defined as R&D spend as a proportion of sales). Among large software
companies, Computer Associates (CA) comes out top. In that year it spent nearly
$400m on R&D, representing more than 20% of sales.
Perhaps more than any other software company, CA has largely grown by
acquisition. It has accumulated a remarkably diverse portfolio of software
products - typically mature products with an established and loyal customer base
- which it largely manages as cash cows. Most products are upgraded at least
annually, to reflect changing platforms (e.g. new versions of Windows), emerging
standards (e.g. web services), security threats, and other external requirements.
This clearly represents a massive amount of development effort, but it is hard to
see much of this expenditure as directly contributing to innovation. CA does have
some genuine and potentially valuable innovation, but this only accounts for a
fraction of its R&D expenditure.

Copyright © Richard Veryard 2010 Page 3

 Red Queen Effect

CA is spending a large amount of development money on maintenance - in other

words, simply keeping its products up-to-date. CA's customers are spending large
amounts of money too - not just in buying CA's products (thus helping to fund
CA's maintenance expenditure) but in additional hardware and other resources.
CA may be an extreme example, but a large proportion of IT activity has long
been consumed by the demands of maintenance. Some experts have suggested
that software engineering has reached a kind of innovation plateau. For example,
Eric Newcomer says "I think we are entering a phase of refinement rather than
innovation. The most significant innovations are over."vii
Paul Brown half agrees.viii He suggests we may be reaching a phase where the
remaining questions are either trivial or imponderable. However, he makes an
important distinction between software technology and software practice; he
argues that software practice is primitive and largely unsupported by science. (I
agree.) He suggests that the first open problem to solve may be to find a way to
marry entrepreneurship with the economic and intellectual climate to create the
next kind of innovation.
If we try to measure innovation in terms of product features or patent
applications, we may be unable to differentiate between the trivial and the
significant. This already happens to some degree in pharmaceuticals, where drug
companies often spend fortunes trying to make trivial changes to existing
products, simply in order to have something new to patent and sell. A so-called
innovation here may consist of a slightly different molecule with almost
indistinguishable medical effects.
On the dark side of pharma, there is a large black market for recreational drugs
and (for professional sportsmen) performance-enhancing drugs, and this results in
an arms race between those trying to produce legal or undetectable substitutes
for banned drugs, and those trying to keep up with this innovation by producing
new regulations and tests. Just as with software viruses and virus protection, a
kind of innovation stalemate can emerge, with constant innovation on both sides
but with a net result close to zero.

Innovation Saturation
In 2005, Jonathan Huebner produced some data indicating that rates of global
innovation have been declining in recent decades.ix In a critical review of
Huebner’s paperx, John Smart disagrees with Huebner’s analysis with regard to
technological innovation. Smart argues that technological innovation “as we
might generally define it” appears to be increasingly rapid, autonomous, and
occurring more below the threshold of human perception with each passing year,
while a number of objectively measurable technological capacities (Moore's law,
etc.) continue to grow at exponential or slightly superexponential rates.
However, Smart accepts that there may have been a decline in rates of human-
initiated innovation (as opposed to that initiated by our technologies) and in
subjective or apparent innovation rates, specifically, technological advances that
are easily observable and classifiable by human beings.
Smart identifies two other factors that might be contributing to Huebner's
observation of declining innovation in the human domain. Firstly, an apparent

vii
http://blogs.iona.com/newcomer/archives/000114.html
viii
Paul Brown, at that time CTO of software firm FiveSight. Blog no longer accessible.
ix
"A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation," Jonathan Huebner, Technological
Forecasting & Social Change, 72(8):988-995.
http://accelerating.org/articles/InnovationHuebnerTFSC2005.pdf
x
http://accelerating.org/articles/huebnerinnovation.html

Copyright © Richard Veryard 2010 Page 4

 Red Queen Effect

saturation of fixed human needs by our accelerating technologies, and secondly

the abstract, higher-order, and incremental nature of innovation in today's
increasingly virtual and human-surpassing digital environment.

Technology Evolution
Consider these questions:
Did the lightbulb or bicycle change more
• between the years 1880-1900?
• or between the years 1980-2000?
Did the computer change more
• from 1950 to 1970?
• from 1980 to 2000?

It is certainly true that there have been huge numbers of small modifications to
devices such as lightbulbs, bicycles and computers since 1980. There has also
been a proliferation of variations and mutations. But will any of this innovation be
remembered in fifty years time? From a historical perspective, this kind of
detailed technological refinement (or even hyperactivity) may seem rather less
significant than the initial burst of technical creativity when the device was taking
shape in the first place.

Hype curve
Popular models of technology change and technology adoption, including those
used by many software industry analysts, fudge the complexities identified in this
section, and assume that the identity and granularity of innovations is
unproblematic.
One analyst firm (Gartner) maps technologies against a so-called Hype Cycle (it’s
actually a curve whose shape has not altered (or accelerated) in ten years. But if
we are to accept the belief in an accelerating technological environment and the
idea that the half-life of new technologies is getting shorter, this would be
consistent with a shifting (shrinking) curve.
Furthermore, we might expect the quantity of attention received by each
technology to be affected by the number of technologies competing for attention -
and if this is increasing, the quantity and/or duration of hype might be reduced -
in other words the hype curve getting steeper. (Surely technologies used to
remain at the top of the hype curve for longer than they do today?)
However, there are several other reasons why we should not take such curves
seriously as empirical theories of technological change. Firstly, all technologies
appear to have the same eventual outcome. And secondly, all the points are
perfectly on the line. To a scientific mind, this indicates that the coordinates are
not based on any real objective measurement, and that the curve itself is not
subject to scientific investigation or calibration. The curve itself is based on a
standard engineering pattern.

Copyright © Richard Veryard 2010 Page 5

 Red Queen Effect

Evolution or Revolution
Mache Creeger asks Evolution or Revolution = Where is the High in High-Tech?xi
"We work in an industry that prides itself on 'changing the world', one that
chants a constant mantra of innovation and where new products could
aptly be described as 'this year’s breakthrough of the century'. While there
are some genuine revolutions in the technology industry, including
cellphones, GPS (global positioning system), quantum computing,
encryption, and global access to content, the vast majority of new product
introductions are evolutionary, not revolutionary. Real technical
breakthroughs are few and far between. Most new products are just a
recycling of an earlier idea."
This represents a challenge to the popular belief in the accelerating rate of
technical change.
Bob Wyman complains about Creeger's distinction between evolution and
revolution, and insists that Evolution = Revolution.xii There are undoubtedly some
complications in evolutionary theory that Creeger doesn't mention. (Wyman
references over a dozen articles in Wikipedia.) But I don't think this alters
Creeger's basic argument about the pace of technological change. Wyman
suggests that the current situation may be interpreted as part of an evolutionary
cycle, and hopes (even predicts) that there is more innovation just around the
corner.
"Today's thinkers are no less smart and no less innovative than were the
folk working 'back in the day'. The difference is that today we're all still
focused on working through the implications of the last revolution. In time
we'll exhaust the realm of easily achieved secondary innovations and we'll
then be ready to move on to more revolutionary 'Cambrian' times again. It
is always like this. It always has been and it always will be."
He appeals vaguely to various intellectual authorities (including Stephen Jay Gould
and the entire Santa Fe Institute) in support of this wishful thinking, before falling
back on some popular but lightweight business literature (Clayton Christensen:
The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution).
How can we measure the true pace of technological change? Some people use
patent activity as a metric, but this metric is made almost meaningless by the
vast number of trivial patents, as both Creeger and Wyman agree. How can we
decide which are the major innovations? Creeger mentions a few, but Wyman has
his doubts even about these.
Even in the absence of detailed empirical data, however, it is always useful to
step back from the current obsession with technical wizardry, and try to get a
bigger picture of technological change. In this spirit, I welcome both Creeger's
polemic and Wyman's reinterpretation, while remaining cautious about the
inevitable subjectivity of both.

Rates of Evolution
We must not assume that technological evolution is the same as biological
evolution. The comparison between biological evolution and technological
evolution may be useful as an explanatory device, or as a source of interesting
hypotheses, but not as a reliable source of predictions about the future. However,
looking at one domain may prompt some interesting and important questions for
the other domain.

xi
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1127873
xii
http://bob.wyman.us/main/2006/05/evolution_revol.html

Copyright © Richard Veryard 2010 Page 6

 Red Queen Effect

The success of evolutionary theory is based in part on painstaking observation

and classification by generations of biologists. We simply don't have an equivalent
body of knowledge about technological innovation. What we have is large
amounts of hype and hot air, and a relatively small number of detailed scientific
studies of particular innovations.
And yet even in biology, measurement of change is problematic. A fascinating
paper by Philip D. Gingerich, shows how the observed rate of evolutionary change
(measured in darwins), varies hugely according to the measurement context.
Context Timescale of Observations Observed Rate of Change

Laboratory 1.5 - 10 years 60,000 darwins

Colonization studies 70 - 300 years 400 darwins

Post-pleistocene mammals 1,000 - 10,000 years 4 darwins

Fossil record Millions of years 0.1 darwins

Philip D. Gingerich, Rates of Evolution: Effects of Time and Temporal Scaling.

Science 14 October 1983: Vol. 222. no. 4620, pp. 159 - 161

In other words, the observed rate of biological evolution appears to be

proportional to the proximity of scientists. Does a similar phenomenon apply to
technological evolution?

Towards a Realistic Model of Technology Change

Thus we need a rigorous model of technology change, which handles some of the
complications raised in this paper.

Asymmetric demand
There are some interesting complications (or asymmetries) in technology change,
and a rigorous model of technology change must clearly articulate the following
three layers.
1. The product is not the technology. A product may be composed from a large
number of components, each of which may be subject to technical innovation.
Product innovation is not a simple linear function of technology innovation; a
product lifecycle can be extremely short, but most of the underlying technology
may be moving much more slowly. Or vice versa.
2. The adoption is not the innovation (as John Hagel points out). Innovation
includes process innovations as well as product innovations. Hagel suggests that
"rapid incremental process innovation combined with aggressive leveraging of
third party resources may in fact hold the key to diminishing, if not overcoming,
the Red Queen effect."
3. The "device" is not the "commodity". Small incremental changes in the product
may result in radical changes in user experience and practice, while radical
substitutions on the technology side may simply be experienced as slight
improvements in service cost and quality. For example, the consumer experience
of innovation in automobiles or electronics or mobile telephones is not based on
the rapid turnover of model numbers and versions, but on major (and relatively
infrequent) step changes in functionality and performance.

Copyright © Richard Veryard 2010 Page 7

 Red Queen Effect

Conclusions
(subject to further analysis)
• Perceptions of technology change are distorted by several effects, including
proximity and fashion, as well as the granularity of measurement itself. So we
shouldn’t take the common perception of accelerating technology change at
face value.
• Theories of technology change are selective, focusing on the more glamorous
(and recent) developments and ignoring other developments altogether.
Which invention has had greater influence over our lives – the internet or the
clock?
• Standard measures of innovation activity (such as patents and R&D
expenditure) include large quantities of trivial developments, as well as
developments whose purpose is to maintain the status quo. However, much of
this activity is irrelevant to most people, and cannot fairly be regarded as
evidence of a social phenomenon of accelerating technology.
• So what exactly is the basis of the common belief in accelerating technology?
To the extent that this belief encourages an unhealthy level of hyperactivity in
modern business and society, what counter-measures are possible or
appropriate?

Notes and References

Some of this material was previously posted on my blog.
Innovatio Novemb http://demandingchange.blogspot.com/2004/11/inno
n or er 2004 vation-or-refinement.html
Refineme
nt
Death of Novemb http://rvsoftware.blogspot.com/2004/11/death-of-
Software er 2004 software.html
Red Septemb http://demandingchange.blogspot.com/2005/09/red-
Queen er 2005 queen-effect.html
Effect
Technolo Septemb http://demandingchange.blogspot.com/2005/09/tech
gy Hype er 2005 nology-hype-curve.html
Curve
Evolution May http://demandingchange.blogspot.com/2006/05/evol
or 2006 ution-or-revolution.html
Revolutio
n
Rates of Septemb http://demandingchange.blogspot.com/2007/09/rate
Evolution er 2007 s-of-evolution.html
Red October http://demandingchange.blogspot.com/2007/10/red-
Queen 2007 queen-effect-2.html
Effect 2

For Dave Bayliss’s model of the Red Queen Effect, see Videoblog: Innovation,
Clockspeed & The Red Queen Effect http://radio-
weblogs.com/0111718/2005/08/31.html#a287 (August 2005). For comment Dave
Bayless has responded to Critiques of the Red Queen Model here
http://swni.typepad.com/dispatches/2007/10/critiques-of-th.html

Copyright © Richard Veryard 2010 Page 8

 Red Queen Effect

For Philip Gingerich’s work on Rates of Evolution, see http://www-

personal.umich.edu/~gingeric/PDGrates/Rates.htm

Relevant Wikipedia articles

Accelerating change
Punctuated equilibrium
Punctuated equilibrium in
social theory
Red Queen
Focuses on Raymond Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating
Returns.
Largely on evolutionary biology - Niles Eldredge
and Stephen Jay Gould
Focuses on evolutionary biology, ignores the use of
the term in other domains.

Copyright © Richard Veryard 2010 Page 9