A Quantum Interpretation of Innovation

After World War II-gaining prominence in the 1970s and 1980s and thanks to the growing power of computers-"scientific management" (not to be confused with the science of business management) achieved tremendous success. Optimization techniques of all kinds were applied with great success to a wide range of business processes. Process optimization, queueing theory, and similar problems fit well within the framework of improvement through mathematical programming. It became even more challenging when quantitative techniques began to be used to try to predict market behavior. We had no choice but to turn to stochastic phenomena. But the question was rarely asked as to whether a certain market behavior was in fact stochastic or rather "chaotic." The latter concept, incidentally, was not yet known at that time, and the necessary conceptual tools did not exist back then.