Holy grail in technical clothing

Are you doing R&D into an enabling technology? If you know the answer to this question is yes, I’m impressed. And I’m not the only one. There are any number of policy-making bodies, not to mention corporations, enamoured of enabling technologies just now and recommending the country, region, industrial sector or R&D department get into enabling technologies PDQ.

I’m not sure what an ‘enabling technology’ is. (Don’t all technologies enable something?) The phrase is one of those that insinuates itself into your conscious mind so gradually that the first time you notice it, you realize first that you’ve heard it a thousand times before and secondly that you have only the vaguest idea what it means.

I first noticed it, in exactly this way, at a workshop put on by an RDA consulting on its forthcoming regional technology strategy. It was the workshop coordinator who used it first, and in a way that suggested 'enabling technologies' are rather important. I asked what it meant. A few fellow delegates volunteered answers. All but one were unconvincing. My fellows – from universities, local companies, trade associations, business-support organizations and so on – were as in the dark as I was.

It turns out that one of the commoner usages is in longer phrases of the kind ‘enabling technology for X’, where X is some technical goal. Hence you can find references to enabling technologies for drug discovery, for example, for law enforcement, for e-business, for petascale electromagnetic accelerator simulation and many more things besides. It's a straightforward turn of phrase. You may question whether technology B will be instrumental in realizing goal A. You may argue that the word ‘enabling’ is not strictly necessary here. But at least you can see what the speaker is proposing to enable and how.

At the RDA's strategy workshop, though, the talk was of ‘enabling technologies’ tout court. No explicit technical goals here, just plain, unqualified 'enabling technologies'. So what was the one plausible answer I got from a fellow delegate? It was more or less this: an enabling technology is one that underpins a broad range of products or services.

Why anyone would choose ‘enabling’ as the adjective to convey this sense, I’m not sure. (What use would a non-enabling technology be?) But it would fit well with my observation that policy-making bodies think highly of enabling technologies. By commonsense reasoning (and I emphasize nothing stronger than that), you might expect companies supplying enabling technologies, and those in their supply chains, to be less sensitive to the vagaries of the end-user markets for any one of the particular products and services enabled by those technologies. If the market for GPS-equipped digital cameras were to flop tomorrow, for instance, it probably wouldn’t extinguish companies supplying GPS modules or research groups researching GPS technologies, because the demand for GPS functionality is diffuse.

So this extempore definition is plausible. Still, without further elaboration, it doesn’t do enough to explain the popularity of ‘enabling technologies’ in policy- and strategy-making circles. It’s not hard to think of many technologies that underpin a very diverse range of applications but don’t attract the envy of ambitious policy makers. Think of screws, springs, blow-moulding, textiles (excluding ‘technical’ textiles), metal bashing, cardboard packaging, toolmaking (excluding rapid tooling etc.)… I’m yet to find any document offering a definition, or even vaguely hinting at one, that distinguishes what policy makers are really after when they ask for enabling technologies from these well-ensconced ‘traditional’ technologies.

There has to be some substance behind the phrase ‘enabling technology’, else it would be easy to conclude that it’s a way for policy makers to say ‘holy grail’ without bringing to their audience members' minds images of an emperor in new clothes. But what is it?