The obstacles to technical creation

by Ileana Vlad, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist

I have written here about barriers that sit inside a person: the fear of ridicule and the conservatism of the mind. But there are also obstacles that sit outside, in the way institutions and procedures are built. They are no less real for being invisible, and they need no ill will in order to work.

I write about mechanisms, not about culprits. The distinction is not diplomacy: an obstacle attributed to a person disappears with that person and returns with the next. An obstacle understood as a mechanism can be worked around.

1. The evaluator’s barrier

The study by Mueller, Melwani and Goncalo, which I discussed in the previous article, shows that under uncertainty the very people who declare that they value creativity become less able to recognise a creative idea.

The consequence is uncomfortable: the committee that rejects a novel proposal is not necessarily hostile. It is uncertain. And the moment of decision is, by definition, the moment of maximum uncertainty. The system asks for novelty to be judged in exactly the state in which novelty is judged worst.

2. The barrier of the criterion

Any system evaluates what it can measure. Papers published, patents filed, funds absorbed, indicators reported. All are measurable and none of them measures the thing that matters: an invention that reached use.

What is not measured has nobody to defend it. A researcher who chooses to carry a solution through to application instead of publishing three more papers makes a choice that costs them on every criterion by which they are judged. Nobody needs to obstruct them; it is enough that nobody rewards them.

3. The barrier of different clocks

The clock of the invention and the clock of the institution run at different speeds. A prototype needs six months; a funding cycle needs eighteen; a mandate lasts four years; a change of curriculum, a decade.

The mismatch is structural, not malicious. But the effect is that projects requiring patience are systematically disadvantaged against those that fit inside a cycle — regardless of their worth.

4. The barrier of continuity

This is the most expensive and the least discussed. A project whose support is a person has exactly the lifespan of that person’s tenure. It starts again from zero at every change, with the documentation redone and the same arguments presented to new people.

This, in fact, is where the argument for institutions comes from. An order, an agency, a foundation, an association — these things are not extra bureaucracy. They are the attempt to make a project independent of who happens to hold office. An institution is, in essence, a mechanism by which an idea outlives the people who had it.

What can be done without waiting for the system to change

Write the proposal so that it survives its sponsor. If the document only makes sense with a conversation alongside it, it disappears when the conversation does.

Find out the criterion before submitting. Not in order to conform, but in order to know what will not be seen — and to say explicitly, in the text, what the grid leaves out.

Look for the person who has the problem, not the person who has the budget. They are rarely the same person, but the first is the one who defends the project when the second hesitates.

Reduce the evaluator’s uncertainty. Not by making the idea less new, but by giving them something to lean on: a prototype that can be touched, a precedent from another country, a small-scale test already done. The barrier is not against novelty, it is against uncertainty — and uncertainty can be reduced without damaging the idea.

Document everything. Not for the archive, but for the next round, which will come, and in which you will need not to start from zero.