Innovation Is Us

Posted by Robert Lee Kilpatrick September 28, 2009 | 0 comment(s)

The term innovation refers to a new way of doing something. It may refer to incremental and emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. Following Schumpeter (1934), contributors to the scholarly literature on innovation typically distinguish between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully in practice. In many fields, something new must be substantially different to be innovative, not an insignificant change, e.g., in the arts, economics, business and government policy. In economics the change must increase value, customer value, or producer value. The goal of innovation is positive change, to make someone or something better. Innovation leading to increased productivity is the fundamental source of increasing wealth in an economy. Source: Wikipedia

The single most important human activity that has allowed us to evolve as a social species has been innovation, or as Darwin demonstrated in his work on natural selection, the power of living beings to adapt. In his two major works, On The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), he demonstrates the ability of living creatures to change in response to new conditions of life, but also the ability to change the environment to suit the organism. In the past five thousand years, through innovation, human beings have increasingly changed the earth in order to support a dramatic and rapid population expansion, and in this process we have created highly differentiated civilizations.  Now, innovation is in us: it is a part of what it means to be human.

How people express themselves innovatively depends on the culture in which they live. Comparing the USA, China, and the EU – the world’s leading innovation engines – offers some interesting insights.

As nations develop, they follow different trajectories towards the future. The United States forgets its past and lives in a perpetual present, with an eye to the future, from the Wall Street perspective, one quarter at a time. What Gore Vidal has wryly called “The United States of Amnesia.” For a population that is continuously expanded and diversified by immigration, there is a restlessness among the people that has driven them from the east coast to the west coast, and back again: first on foot, then on horseback, and wagon, and train, and automobile, and airplane. Always meeting new people and challenges in this huge expanse has led to innovation on a grand scale.  It is understood by the American government and the American people that innovation is all about what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” in economics. The collapse of General Motors, Lehman Brothers bank, and other landmark industrial and financial institutions in 2008-2009, without massive social and political upheaval, indicates this acceptance.

Americans have innovated to survive, and thrive on the North American continent, always believing that the grass is greener over the next ridge. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was born and live, innovation is in our blood – social innovation, political innovation, technical innovation, and business innovation.  Many of the tools I use in my work have all emanated from Bay Area companies. The search engines I use to gather information (Google and Yahoo), the MacBook Pro and iPhone to stay connected (Apple), using computer chips (Intel), and my favorite animation studio (Pixar) all have grown and developed in this amazing “innovation ecosystem.”  My colleague and friend, Matt Gardner, who is President of BayBio, the biotechnology association for the Bay Area, explains that the San Francisco region is, mile for mile, the most innovative place on the planet. As a native Californian, I feel very fortunate to have been able to be a part of this powerhouse my entire life. If I had not been born in California, I would have moved here because it is one of the few places in the world where anything is possible, and that is a good reason to wake up in the morning with energy and motivation.

Looking across the Pacific Ocean, to China, which has undergone the greatest economic transformation in the history of the world, one cannot help but feel a sense of awe. Being from California, I have had an experience of China and Chinese people from childhood, and perhaps my earliest memory of a restaurant meal is of a dish called aromatic chicken in foil. My brother and I were sent to the car because we had a laughing fit. I have always been fascinated by China and while at Cambridge University I was befriended by Dr. Joseph Needham whose research project on “Science and Civilization in China” has detailed how many of the most important discoveries in science came originally from China. Curiously, Needham’s colleagues in China were unaware of this, and it took a European to show the Chinese that their historical legacy in science and technology was rich and varied.  His incredible life journey is described by Simon Winchester in The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom.

Looking at modern China, to which I now travel frequently and where I have many good friends, I cannot help but see the same forces in action that Needham noticed over half a century ago: a selective forgetting in order to create social space for the future in minds and memories.

China deliberately destroys its past to make way for the future. The architecture of centuries, and the social fabric that has grown up with it is uprooted, to create massive urban centers defined by the application of new technology. Whole communities of Hutongs in Beijing with their courtyards and bicycle paths are replaced with eight-lane expressways in just a few years. As the Nationalist era rejected the imperial era, and the Mao era rejected the Nationalist era, so do the youth of China now reject the little blue cap with a red star in favor of Facebook and Starbucks. In China, the past represents the dark times, and the future represents the golden times. The future is embodied in the present, and in any Chinese city, the visitor can see the evidence all around them.

China is at a crossroads in its development as five powerful forces collide. Firstly, China is reaching back to its older roots in Confucianism, which places great importance on education for the moral development of the individual, with individuals acting together, in harmony, to create a benevolent State, rather than a government based on coercion.  Secondly, capitalism is rising as a force for change in China, as more and more peasants come to the fast growing cities to work in factories – Chinese and foreign-owned. Ownership of private property is on the rise. Thirdly, the Communist Party of China continues to make many of the most important decisions related to the economic development of the country, through various national and regional ministries. Fourthly, China is looking outward to the rest of the world, for the first time in its history, and new ideas and people are in contact with Chinese society.  Finally, China is becoming a major player in what is now termed the “global economy” which is something completely new in human history. These five forces are not in harmony, nor are they in fact completely manageable. In China today, we see perhaps the fault-lines most clearly, as the world tries to improve the lives of human beings on an unprecedented scale, without destroying the planet we rely on for survival. This task requires an incredible commitment to innovative thought and action.

Many of my Chinese colleagues and friends are members of the important organization called BayHelix, which is comprised of leaders of Chinese heritage in the global life sciences and healthcare community. Their statement of purpose is: “We aspire to shape the growth of the life sciences and healthcare industry around the Pacific Rim and beyond, foster and create business opportunities, supply and nurture the leaders for the community, and network and share information and experience.  BayHelix is a non-profit organization and its membership is by-invitation-only.” Most have been trained in the USA, Canada and Europe, and they straddle the line between China and the West. Their influence has been crucial in helping Chinese bureaucrats at the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), and the China National Center for Biotechnology Development (CNCBD), to embark on a development path that uses the life sciences to create a new business culture in China, which is world-class, yet sustainable. My friends at BayHelix face a huge challenge in fostering innovation in modern China.

What is not yet fully grasped by the managers of China’s meteoric rise on the world stage is that true innovation is based on open access to ideas, and innovation is as much a social and political process as is a technical one. The main driver of innovation in biotechnology, for example, comes from the opportunity to form partnerships, based on the free exchange of ideas – face-to-face, on the internet, at conferences, and other social gatherings. Moving a step further, is the skill to sell ideas, in a competitive environment, in which the merits of a case, and the truth of facts, are respected, and in fact given a sanctuary in which to thrive. China’s challenge is to create a society, which encourages its people to be innovative, while accepting the unstable nature of innovation – and the fact that true innovation is a force that is ultimately as destructive as creative.

Looking across the Atlantic Ocean, to Europe where I have been active since 1980, I see a civilization that relishes its cultural history, and seeks to build a knowledge-based economy while retaining the splendor of five centuries of artistic and scientific expression – modern offices, factories and research institutes behind ancient facades.  Changing demographics worry government planners, who ponder the question of how to maintain the high standard of living that European populations enjoy, as they become, in common with Americans, an entitlement society. The hard work and dedication to improvement that characterized post-war European societies are now but a memory as young people jet off to sunny climes for vacation breaks.

A shrinking and aging population in Europe has neighbors in Africa and the Middle East that have some of the fastest growing populations on earth. Europe maintains its prosperity by being more innovative in many ways. The ending of European wars as a means of settling disputes has saved millions of lives and billions of euros and pounds. Few would argue that the creation of the European Union (EU), and the European monitory system (Euro-zone) is worse than a third world war in Europe. Funds have been freed up to invest in infrastructure, and it is a real pleasure to travel in fast and clean trains, to use spacious and well designed airports, and to benefit from government investments in shared assets, or what used to be called the “commons” in the English speaking world.

In Europe, innovation is understood holistically – social, political, financial, and technical. Public and private resources are combined to find solutions that benefit society as a whole, not only to reward risk-takers and technical innovators. Sure, many of the richest people in the world live in Europe, but they enter into a social contract, which balances personal gain with public benefit. Skeptics say that Europe’s glory days are over, and that the most important innovation is now taking place elsewhere, particularly in Asia. I doubt that very much. Europe has chosen to create an innovation model that is perhaps new in the 21st century – one based on a management system that uses political tools to control the socially disruptive power of technical innovation. The old exploitation economic model embodied in the early stages of European capitalism, and its later form – imperialism - has been replaced by a partnership model, which is expected to be both sustainable, and manageable. The world watches to see how Europe will pull this experiment off. The European Commission is making a huge commitment of resources to the challenge of making the world’s largest single market a leader of global innovation.

Looking ahead, I plan to delve deeper into innovation and the bio-economy as it is being developed around the world. Different models are being applied in the USA, Europe, Russia, India, China, Brazil, and Japan. There are strengths and weaknesses inherent in each. No system is perfect. We now live in a multi-polar world. Knowing about our neighbors is necessary. The world my grandparents grew up in was largely defined by European or European-derived ideas and institutions. My parents came to maturity in a time when Europe destroyed itself and the United States came out of the second world war as the only fully intact industrial economy, with all our competitors in ruins: Japan, Germany, Great Britain, China, France, Russia – all in disarray. I was raised in a world dominated by an empire of the mind, in which American economic supremacy held sway globally together with the cultural icons of Elvis Presley, Disney, Coca-Cola, and more recent stars such as McDonalds, Michael Jackson, Amazon.com, Facebook – the list is enormous and growing.

Young people today, in all countries, live in a world that is no longer dominated by a single power or overriding idea. No single country, or language, or religion, or economic system wholly controls the world. Change is now the defining driver of reality: climate change, demographic change, technological change, and the most basic change of all for any living creature - the availability of food and other energy to survive. As the “petroleum age” comes to an end, innovation will become more necessary than ever before. The life sciences will become instrumental in helping human civilization to survive, and ability to apply the principles of living systems will become central to a sustainable economy in which human life, and all other life on earth are no longer at odds.

As a species we are at an inflection point in time. Everything we have experienced has prepared us for this moment. We are fortunate indeed, because we are able to benefit from an expanded consciousness, an awareness of a single living planet that is moving on, with or without us. We still have a chance to grow and develop with it, because innovation is us.
 

Dr. Robert Lee Kilpatrick – Biotech Gadfly

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Gadfly - a term for people who upset the status quo by posing upsetting or novel questions, while at the same time being accepted as a description of honorable work or a civic duty.
  - From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

RESOURCES

Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin
Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1883-1950): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schumpeter
Gore Vidal (1925 - ): http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/vidal_g.html
BayBio: http://www.baybio.org/wt/page/index
Simon Winchester: The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom.
Needham Research Institute: http://www.nri.org.uk/joseph.html
BayHelix: http://www.bayhelix.org/
Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China (MOST): http://www.most.gov.cn/eng/
China National Center for Biotechnology Development (CNCBD): http://www.cncbd.org.cn/INTROE/INTRO/index1.html
European Commission Enterprise and Industry: http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/innovation/index_en.htm

0 Comment(s)