Can you force innovation?
Human race has been innovating ever since. That’s how we got here. The process had its ups and downs over the millenniums but was it ever planned and executed as part of one group’s deliberate strategy or it happened organically as a result of many factors e.g. social developments that triggered the upswing cycle in this process?
Many politicians and business leaders are calling today for innovation upswing cycle to be triggered. They hope that this can be ‘cooked’ in somebody’s strategy room and plant in a company or a nation with usual strategy planning and control tools in force.
Yes, you can create an open participative culture and nurture employees/citizens to encourage dialog and generate ideas of all kinds. You can also use information tools to filter and bring those fresh ideas upstream in order to give them a chance to be tested in practice, evaluated and then implemented or shelved. If you were practicing the opposite in the past this change will definitely bring a positive improvement. The question is will it (only) be incremental i.e. insufficient to trigger a turnaround?
However, if you haven’t been that bad in the past, to say at least, but you already achieved a reputation of “high innovator” (as is the case of US as a nation), can you cook it now to get into third gear because you see it as an ultimate solution to your current problems?
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No, I don't think you can. I mean if you went up to someone and told them to be innovative I doubt you'd get much from them. Not as simple as that is it?
Kelly, as western governments currently battle with crisis (contraction, stagnation or minimal growth) and desperately try to revive that growth to more significant levels, their leaders recognise INNOVATION as one of top solutions for their problems, and especially, the UNEMPLOYMENT. I agree with you i.e. have doubt if quantitity of good and usable ideas can be boosted intentionally. Yes, you can create, for example, a new space programme with thousends of scientists working on it and generating more ideas which can be used elsewhere (this worked before) but it is enormously expensive with uncertain ROI. I see better opportunity in creating an environment that can efficiently capture, describe, filter and push valuable innovations right through to their practical testing and implementation stages which can create jobs very soon!
Perhaps an Innovation Bank on a national level e.g. UK would work. Of course, using a high technology platform. However there will be many challenges on this route. (1) How to motivate innovators to participate? I would suggest an evaluation grading system for ideas from "pie in the sky" to "applicable immediately" level which will yield some monetary awards as an inventor progress upscale. (2) How to motivate private investors, entrepreneurs as well as public institutions to participate i.e. bring funds in?
The Obama speech was typical of the man. Heavy on rhetoric and hyperbole, very light on any details and facts. Of course he can't control innovation and it's folly to think he can.
Well America was voted the most innovative country in the world recently, so it is a bit odd for Obama to mention the need to be more innovative in his State of the Union speech. Surely one of the main things any government can do to encourage innovation is to give people freedom to spend their money as much as possible?
After all, there have been lots of innovative platforms developed in recent years with things like Innocentive or the X Prize, but none of those have been state run ventures, so their record for success is not good at all.