Last week I had another conversation about innovation with my editor friend—the same editor who had asked me earlier about challenges to the conventional wisdom in innovation policy. She pointed out that it’s very easy for the magazine to get articles and op-eds that diagnose the problems with our innovation system, but much harder to get good “agenda-setting” stories—that is, articles and op-eds that start from a cogent analysis of the issues, but then go on to lay out a specific, practical, concrete policy agenda for moving forward.
I told her that I know one or two people (to put it mildly) who might have some opinions in this area. But rather than just send her a bunch of names and papers, I thought I would try to get an online conversation going here on Starclouds, and see if we could do some collective brainstorming.
So—consider this a call for comments. Is our innovation/competitiveness policy on the right course? Are officials even framing the issues in the right way? And if not, what directions should we be going?
Remember-specific, concrete, practical…
A narrative history of personal computing and the Internet.
The story of the Santa Fe Institute and the emerging science of complex adaptive systems.
My first book—a study of artificial intelligence.
11 Comments
The question of innovation policy as represented in the Gathering Storm shows that as a nation we are flailing at inchoate indicators and have little understanding of the dynamics of innovation and its impacts in the global economic and technological environment that is emerging. The complexity of the interconnections amongst researchers and amongst competing and collaborating firms and institutions around the planet is a fundamental challenge to coherent, sensible national innovation policies. Policies should stem from strategy and strategy should emerge from clear understanding of the issues and problems. It is not clear that we even understand who the patient is, let alone what disease he has–but we are formulating potential treatments anyway!
Excellent point, Dick. But precisely what indicators and interconnections *should* we be paying attention to?
Let me take the contrarian approach: Do we really need an innovation *policy*? In other words, by the time the idea is codified in a policy, can it truly be innovative (especially, given the influence of lawyers on the end product)?
Mitch hi.
Well, you asked a mouthful and I could bend your ear
all day.
For example, how come I was able to patent more than a
dozen fundamental traits of human conversation, that
have never been used online? Is that innovation?
Especially if no one is interested?
What is innovation ‘policy’? Is government the chief
nexus of innovation any longer? Or have we returned
to an older human model, an aristocratic model, in
which the proliferation of billionaires will transform
innovation into a realm controlled by whim?
This isn’t to be sneezed-at! Aristocratic whim gave
us the pyramids and Mona Lisa. If we really are
re-entering that long era, then we need to think about
how to make the best of it. I have pondered this,
long and hard: http://www.davidbrin.com/eon1.html
Or else, are we entering an Age of Amateurs?
http://www.futurist.com/archives/society-and-culture/value-and-empowerment/
And what about those promises of a looming
“singularity?” WIll innovation save or doom us?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000EOU4RQ
It boils down to a question of whether we can get
smarter enough to cope. A more general version of
your question. But we are on the same long page.
All best,
david brin
author of EARTH, The Postman, and The Transparent Society
http://www.davidbrin.com
A comment emailed to me from Michael Kanellos:
——————————————-
Government funding of research. Works every time. It’s where we got solar panels, the Internet, hybrid drive trains and a lot of semiconductor advances. Dump billions on geographically diverse universities, let in foreign students, and make the established tech transfer policies more universal.
The irony of an innovation policy, is that we need to be more innovative about how we deliver, measure, improve and achieve the outcomes we push through government policies. If we don’t we will continue to get comments about whether an innovation policy from government is worth the investment of tax payers. We also have to look at innovation in a very different light to quantum computing, photo electric polymers and solar cells. In essence, government is limited in affecting policy, primarily through fiscal means e.g we’ll fund research into biotechnology. We have to change that paradigm, that affecting policy is simply a fiscal extension, and get more effectiveness about how we support innovation and I don’t believe policy makers are the best judge of that effectiveness but the expert community. I believe, the greatest asset that a community has in delivering and more importantly maturing innovative thought is the propagation and support of knowledge programs between expert groups to mature policy and then direct fiscal measures to support innovative programs.
Everyone has heard of money multipliers, but what about knowledge multipliers. Thomas Jefferson once said that information is the currency of democracy, and in economics 101 we learn that one of the the tiers of perfect competition is perfect knowledge. Innovation is often evolutionary, and adoption based on visibility, hence innovation policy should focus on sharing and the maturity of innovation/knowledge programs, and a process of making visible those innovations that through a series of peer accepted forums become visible to the right communities.
If you have ever seen a government policy being developed you will have no doubt about the political dependencies and the very finite time frames and knowledge pools a person or a small team of policy writers will depend on to deliver a framework and then final policy. If you’re lucky and its of national or state importance, you’ll have access to think tanks and various ‘experts’ sometimes pushed by various lobby groups. If the policy has to be derived due to political heat, you may have access to more funds to form a more extensive enquiry. This process leads often to re-invention, and the level of independence required to develop an objective based policy becomes jeopardised. Ethanol policies are a classic example of the latter.
Think for a minute that government is one knowledge engine with people with great ideas that have innovated in the real world or have contact with those in industry or the general public that do. What if, we were to create a new strateyg/policy, call it the Think Stream strategy for now that would be a social experiment in policy creation, where using the social technologies of our generation e.g Linkedin, Facebook, we were to create firstly a national community of experts (like Wikipedia) and where innovation and live case studies in a diverse area of Meta areas would discuss, digg (vote) and provide government with visibility of innovative programs the community thought important, and government funding was allocated based on community opinion. Wouldn’t that be a democracy in action? A utopia, yes in many respects, because of the political risk management issues around this and the destabilizing of lobby groups and industry Coops. But one can dream. This is however a true bipartisan approach to policy creation that can also propagate and encourage the public to participate in a national innovation/knowledge agenda.
Regards,
Chris
A nearly universal issue faced by governments, companies, and other organizations in thinking about research funding is the tension between short and long term objectives. Research tends to have an impact in the long term. When organizations become consumed by the short term, their focus on the long term fades away. Strategic research and strategic investment requires a view that sees ahead to trends and opportunities — and invests in the present to prepare for the future.
Looking around the world at countries that are currently making big investments per capita in research (and infrastructure and education), it is striking how much this is shifting to Asia.
Research creates opportunities both for improved quality of life and also improved economies. One of my academic advisers startled me when I was in graduate school with the assertion that research investment was the MAIN (if not the only) kind of investment that countries (and other organizations) could make that have this effect. Investments in the present can mediate problems. Investments in the future change the equation.
Governments and other organizations want to achieve benefits from the research that is funded. Benefits accrue from a combination of things — including not only scientific results, but also from a willingness to invest in subsequent development and marketing and from some business-like input about leverage. Fundamentally, this suggests that the planning of research deserves input not only from the scientists that do it, but also from the businesses that will bring the benefits to society.
In my “Breakthrough” book, there is a chapter about the “Dance of the Two Questions.” One of the questions is “what is needed?” The other question is “what is possible?” In broad terms, scientists are more competent with the first question, and business people are more competent with the second. The dance stretches imagination and improves focus. For example, a business or marketing person might not realize that a solution to a familiar problem is even possible. A researcher may not realize that the technology that they have in hand could fill a need in an area that they have not thought about.
To translate these observations into a concrete agenda, I suggest the following:
* Government investment in research should leverage the wisdom and insight of the business community. This can be tapped both by (1) encouraging business investment in research through tax incentives and (2) by having appropriate business input to the government’s research investment processes. Restated, peer review and planning of new areas of research should involve broad, business input.
* Innovation arises in many different settings, including both large research organizations and small ones. Government funding of research should spread its bets to a degree. We should experiment with tax, accounting, and research funding initiatives that are intended to spur innovation in organizations of different sizes across our economy.
* It is striking to me that I am making these suggestions using a networked social medium. These technologies lower the costs of information sharing. Perhaps there are new opportunities for fostering innovation that draw directly on new emerging social media.
Innovation — ah, that magic word. My studies convince me that the very word misses the target.
I have been thinking hard about innovation lately. I now find myself co-directing two programs in innovation at Northwestern University: A Master of Science program in “Design Engineering and Innovation” and an MBA + Engineering program (between the Kellogg School and Northwestern Engineering) that concentrates upon Design and Operations: MMM (One of the Ms used to stand for “manufacturing,” but in this modern world that word migrated to Operations, so now MMM stands for the two degrees students get MBA + MEM). Innovative title, eh?
Innovation comes in many sizes and flavors. Do I innovate when I make the manufacturing floor more efficient, or redo the supply chain management, or even the way goods are sold in stores? Yes, although I bet that isn’t what you had in mind. I bet you were thinking of what people usually think of as innovation. “Invent the light bulb!” They shout. “Invent television!” “Where is the next iPod?” But it is incremental innovation, making existing things better, or improving manufacturing or distribution that is the most important part of innovation in terms of major impact upon the world. But that’s the dull part, isn’t it..
Successful innovation requires a supporting platform – an infrastructure. Edison didn’t invent the light bulb, he took an existing invention and improved upon it. More importantly, he knew that to be successful, he needed a system: electric generating plants, wires strung through the streets, wires inside homes, even standardized sockets in which to put the bulbs. Television floundered until it met up with the proper infrastructure to support it. The Fax machine was invented in the 1800s, but it wasn’t until he Japanese saw a real need because their language at the time had no viable keyboards that it took off. The iPod is a complex system, from licensing of music and videos, to an SAP database (iTunes), to excellent down- and upload capabilities, to the portable devices, to trademarking and licensing agreements to 3rd party suppliers.
The easy part of innovation is the idea. The hard part is getting it produced through existing company infrastructure, where any really radical idea is guaranteed to reduce profitability for the first few years. Or getting the idea introduced into a reluctant marketplace, where even simple innovations (such as replacing phonograph records with CDs or VCR tapes with DVDs or VCRs with PDRs) takes decades, so the early pioneering companies end up losing a lot of money (at first) and often going bankrupt unless they are like Philips and Sony (in the case of CD), well bankrolled.
So we need to turn the conversation away from the fun part “how do we get people to be more creative?” to the hard part “how do we actually transform the ideas into practice.
That’s why the process innovation, the part that makes manufacturing, distribution, better, or the part that makes small, but valuable transformation of existing products is where most of the activity is focused – and properly.
Brand new ideas require a huge amount of hard to work to introduce, to get through the vagaries of a company where its owners (the stock market) wants daily progress reports, and where the public can take years and decades to accept a radical idea.
Innovation is a very complex topic. A few blurbs on a website, including this contribution, simply cannot get to the depths of the complexity.
Don Norman http://www.jnd.org (see mmm.northwestern.edu)
Thanks for the thoughtful comments, Don. In fact, this kind of incremental, systems-style innovation is exactly what I had in mind, and I appreciate your making the case so cogently.
Successful innovation involves much, much more than what happens in the laboratory. That part of it is necessary, but hardly sufficient…
Hi Mitch–
This is an interesting question. Beyond governmental funding, there has been and is currently a lot of private money being offered for innovation. The X-prize, for example, is not a large prize (definitely not large enough to cover the costs incurred by companies in the process of product development), but it has been marketed such that winning it would bring some amount of notoriety and the promise of future financial gain. Contests such as the X-prize are an additional avenue for driving innovation in areas where the government is not quite ready to tread. The contest aspect stimulates peoples’ competitive nature, which I think lies at the heart of all major advances.
Best,
–kirsten
http://www.thisweekinscience.com
A very good point, Kirsten. Thanks. But your last sentence raises another interesting question. I agree that competitiveness is one important driver of innovation. But is it the only driver? What about the intellectual satisfaction of solving a hard problem? And what about the thirst for recognition by friends and colleagues? (Of course, you could say that the latter is just another form of competitiveness—but it’s not necessarily the same thing as an interest in financial gain…)