Innovation Nation

Citation

Richardson, J. (2009), "Innovation Nation", Foresight, Vol. 11 No. 2, pp. 65-67. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680910950174

Attitude is everything

“Ho hum!”, the reader may say, “yet another diatribe on flagging research and technical development in the USA”. Not so, because critic John Kao uses another approach in this book. Witness his subtitle, How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do to Get It Back. And he delivers, in all three rubrics.

Based largely on his professional experience as an advisor on the processes of innovation to governments, corporations, academia and non‐governmental bodies, Kao makes a world survey of where innovation is taking hold. In part supplanting the lead long held by the USA and Japan, pioneering now takes place in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Finland, Denmark, Estonia – not to mention China and India. While these countries have not yet the economic clout in absolute figures of the USA and Japan, the relative portions of their gross national product (GNP) devoted to investment in innovation can reach 3 percent. In Japan and the USA, the recent figure may float between 1 and 2 percent depending on the year cited.

However Kao insists that money is not the sole contributor to the development of new designs, processes, products and services. Also critical are the will to make things happen, the cultural ambience, opportunity, perseverance and luck. Essential, too, is the realization by forward‐looking managers of an interdisciplinary attitude: the “two cultures” so identified by C.P. Snow as long ago as 1959 are slowly merging, as the “human sciences” mix ever more easily with engineering and the natural sciences.

The what, where and how of becoming innovative

Confronted professionally by what he terms “ wicked problems”, the author lists these as climate change, environmental degradation, communicable diseases, education, water quality, poverty, population migration, and energy sufficiency. These issues hold:

[…] the keys to making the most consequential breakthroughs of the twenty‐first century. They interest me because…] Innovation applied to a wicked problem can realize and enormous amount of social and economic value by setting new commercial standards, creating new businesses, and generating new sources of value. For a country that aspires to become an Innovation Nation, the search for opportunities to do good and still do well will allow it to exercise its innovation muscle (p. 24).

This and other passages throughout the book reflect the author's varied background as budding concert pianist, accomplished jazzman, practicing medical doctor and psychiatrist, and business‐school professor (Harvard).

In a chapter called “The importance of place” (in which to dream up novelty – preferably with a team of brainstormers), Kao has an aggressively creative view:

It's no good having a new ideas without powerful tools to disseminate them […] Put the idea generators in your dream space together with constituents from throughout the organization and allow team members to tell their imaginative stories, which can also be captured on the fly via digital video, streaming internet media, storyboards or graphic recording. That will give you the potential to generate a lot of passion as well as alignment throughout the organization and beyond (p. 150).

Sound counsel, indeed, because the formula is known to work, from start‐ups to medium‐sized biotechnology firms to “skunk works” in the aerospace and other heavy technologies.

Regions such as North America and Western Europe need to guard against letting their achievements (including public works) wither on the vine, reminds Kao. Citing a survey made in 2005 by the American Society of Civil Engineers, he notes that this professional body:

awarded America a “D” grade for its physical infrastructure, which some describe as “decaying” [and comprehending] roads, bridges, railways, telecommunications grids, waste‐ and water‐handling systems. The bgroup estimated that $1.3 trillion would be needed just to attain “acceptable” conditions […] a real “tax” on our ability to invest in the future (p. 41).

Deploring the poor performance of many secondary‐school students in America, Kao cites a bevy of information technology‐based approaches that are succeeding in improving the situation. A few among the many are:

• •

  The programme called ePals' SchoolMail, providing “a suite of online tools that make it safe and easy for students and teachers to communicate online. Language translation is built into discussion boards and file sharing”.

• •

  SchoolBlog, which “makes it possible for students to get to know each other cross barriers of space and language. Using ePals' Safebrowser software, teachers can [also] build so‐called walled gardens to house educational web sites that children can safely access and use” (p. 104).

Ideas for recruiting youth, strengthening national policy

Kao proposes six specific approaches to the recruitment of youngsters to a career in innovation. They apply almost anywhere, and we cite them (pp. 109‐11):

1. 1.

   Recruit America's brightest junior high‐school students as full‐time apprentices to leading innovators.

2. 2.

   Market the importance of education to the American people in order to galvanize them into action.

3. 3.

   Mobilize the talent of mass media to making innovation as compelling as becoming a singing star.

4. 4.

   Create and support alternative avenues for learning that are complementary to schools.

5. 5.

   Enable a network of talent brokers and entrepreneurs to identify national goals, organize leadership teams by field, launch partnerships with business and academia, and lobby for support at every political level.

6. 6.

   Use Ballyhoo the wunderkind generation of high‐powered, high‐tech innovators as role models.

Innovator Kao believes strongly, furthermore, that any nation desiring to build on the theme of innovation needs a sustained national policy of attracting foreign students to its educational process, hopeful that some of the graduates will stay on and join the local labour or managerial forces. In the case of the USA too many Asians who went there, to earn doctorates and remain to teach or work, have opted to join a brain drain in reverse and return home.

While he is far from desirous of seeing exclusively top‐down mentoring of the innovation process by either government or industry, Kao believes strongly that at the present juncture the USA is much in need of an official agenda to restabilize six decades of varying government involvement un the process. He advocates instituting:

• •

  A national innovation advisor, who would function much as do the national advisors for economics and security, reporting directly to the president. This specialist would be an “activist … armed with the clout to marshal cooperation from cabinet‐level players”.

• •

  A national innovation council, convened and led by the above national advisor, embodying “company presidents, scientists and technologists, cultural leaders, media mavens, policy experts, financiers and more”, who would combine “the private and public sectors, and a blend of ages, professions, ethnicities, and genders” – all expected to serve for prolonged periods, strictly in the national interest.

• •

  An office of innovation assessment, modeled in part along the lines of the defunct Office of Technology Assessment (1972‐1995), abandoned at the time for the sole purpose of saving $22 million annually. (Note that the war in Iraq has been costing the American taxpayer $1 billion, each week.) The Office would be responsible to the Congress. Such parliamentary oversight would assure that the new Office would “develop a more concerted, coordinated national” effort to pinpoint and understand “technologies that stand astride large, new streams of opportunity like gatekeepers” while “removing bottlenecks to their realization” (pp. 218‐22).

To the last recommendation, innovator Kao adds the following:

Specific approaches such as technology road‐maps, immersive collaboration, prediction markets, ongoing scenario planning, and forecasting can provide a more accurate sense of emerging agendas around the world that in turn can provide at least a rough map suggestive of future possibilities to guide action and investment (p. 222).

Biting the bullet

Following his detailed psychoanalysis of one nation afflicted with a serious case of de‐innovationitis, Dr Kao does not remain blind to what the monetary costs might result from a remedial scenario of “innovating innovation” – as he calls the visionary process several times in the book. To launch the renovation process, he proposes to paraphrase Swedish industrial consultant Bo Ekman, who famously editorialized in the Stockholm newspaper Expressen “What's the use of Sweden?” The implication of Ekman's question is that if a modern nation does not move ahead in the highest gear it is bound to falter.

“My proposed answer” to the Swede's query, responds innovationist Kao, “is that America accept the mantle of accelerant for global innovation by steering the world towards addressing the formidable range of wicked problems we face”.

Kao knows that the USA has met such a challenge previously, with its emergence from the depression of the 1930s to the development of nuclear energy during the Second World War and then the race to the Moon in the 1960s. Starkly, the country is “now in need of a new national narrative” (pp. 266‐7).

This remarkable book is worth many times its price to any manager, anywhere, in whatever profession or discipline, faced by the obligation and desire to innovate.