Effects of culture on knowledge production

Consider this: How do we come about to invent a new dish, such as Singapore's 'national food' Chicken Rice?

I assume there has been a long history of cooking meat inside boiling water, or what we called 水煮. So people have knowledge of how to get the tender chicken out of boiling water. It is easy to get hard chicken meat out of it. I saw some chicken rice stall hanging and drying raw chicken at the back of the food center. Therefore, the knowledge on process the chicken before boiling has to be in place.

Then, was the way to cook rice with chicken fragrance. I assumed during the processing of chicken, some of the oil or parts were treated to produce thick soup, which was mixed with the rice for cooking. Reuse of excess food is an important chinese culture of thrift and also key to a lot of Chinese cuisine. These two knowledge probably can fused into a new process in cooking rice. Perhaps before that, Singaporeans had toyed with different soup that can be used to cook with rice, thus strengthening the knowledge on the ability of rice to mix with different ingredients.

Also, chicken rice cannot be too good without the availability of sesame oil, soy sauce, and thick soy sauce. The last is about the most important. It wasn't too salty and a bit sweet. It is something which I cannot find easily outside Singapore.

Someone intelligent, within that particular environment and have access to people knowing each of these specific knowledge, may at one point mix and invent Chicken Rice, a food that drove many businesses in Singapore today, even sold in top hotels and restaurants. However, it would be hard for soy sauce makers, rice makers, or soup makers to know that their knowledge is key to the invention of something greater. Each of them is a piece of the great infrastructure that allows innovation to happen.

This long winded and semi fictitious case I wrote is to argue for the important of social infrastructure, including key knowledge, social network, and people who can bring these together.

I sense that many of the new economies who are trying to bring in knowledge production can easily replicate key knowledge, which are skills, text books, and people. However, networking them productively is not as easy. Ideas cannot get synthesize due to intellectual property, traditional decision making structure, trust, lack of short term profit, or shortsightedness and lack of beliefs in collaboration. I think that a culture can establish the smoothest social networking protocol that enables the fastest knowledge exchange between trustworthy people will come out winning in every innovation contest.