Yes We Can: Innovating out of a recession

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3 comments

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+ Michael Stewart 2 months ago
Saw this live Norman.

Fantastic presentation, brilliant insight, it really had the crowd talking about it in the break afterwards.

Hope we get to see the whole presentation video online or on TED - will you let us know on Twitter if it is online.

Thanks again.

Michael
@mj52art
+ Dana Montenegro 2 months ago
This is perfect - Norman Lewis pushes the point perfectly: a culture of risk aversion is putting our future at risk despite all the evidence in our past as to what is possible when we push beyond our point of knowing the outcome.

Way to go and beautifully done.

Dana Montenegro > SeriouslyCreative.com
+ Rosario Sica 2 months ago
great!

But what the growth statistics obscured was that there was relatively little wealth creation in the West. During this period, capital investment and growth of productivity remained sluggish. It is worth noting that countries like Britain and America imported capital faster than they were exporting anything in return for it. These countries became addicted not only to capital imports from abroad, but also to relying on an unprecedented expansion of credit to maintain economic activity. One important consequence of the expansion of credit was the growth of the finance sector as an important component of the service sector. By the time of the credit crunch, the financial sector accounted for around 30 per cent of the British economy. On both sides of the Atlantic, industry continued to decline.

Financial innovationBUT Neglect of technological innovation.decline of technological innovation is the basis for all of today’s financial shenanigans

Business expenditure on R&D as a percentage of GDP has risen only in Japan in the past 20 years; in the US and the EU, it has been stagnantSecond, government expenditure on R&D as a percentage of GDP has – again, with the exception of Japan – been in a steep descent

These titles and the proliferation of articles on innovation show how trivialised and vacuous the term has become. The concept has become a cultural affectation and an advertising gimmick. The fact that innovation is no longer simply about Research and Development (R&D), technology or investment but is now applied to everything that moves: culture, employees, creativity, thinking on the left side of the brain, role-models, etc., reveals that the discussion is one that is taking place within its own terms and is no longer linked to a broader purpose. This extraordinary attempt to promote innovation is, as I will argue below, a sign of its absence.If we were living through an era of innovation we would be having a different discussion. We would be talking about inventions or technologies or their impact or what is next. Instead we are talking about innovation as an end in itself unrelated to any broader social process which is hardly innovative. It apes the equally vacuous debate in political circles about the ‘Big Idea’. If it existed politicians and the media would be talking about solving problems rather than trying to find the Big Idea

The tool company developed a zero-impact wrench for the Gemini project that spun bolts in zero gravity without spinning the astronaut.

Technologies invented for one thing evolve into something else:Who could have predicted google? eBay? Amazon? MySpace? Facebook? QQ?

The result is the development of a culture of success which institutionalises rigidity because it cannot countenance failure or deviation from delivering predictable results

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Yes We Can: Innovating out of a recession - Presentation Transcript

YES WE CAN
INNOVATING OUT OF A RECESSION
Dr Norman Lewis, Chief Strategy Officer, Wireless Grids Corporation, USA
10 September 2009
They were all at it!
The West living on other people’s money?
R&D
Globaldecline of R&D spending as % of GDP(apart from Japan)
* Main Science & Technology Indicators, OECD, December 2008, p1
r&D
326,266
105,503
Books with ‘innovation’ in their titles
Amazon.com
Amazon.co.uk
Lots of books about innovation…
…but little innovation to be seen
VISION & LEADERSHIP
…because it was difficult!
Created industries and jobs and spin-offs
Era of short-term pragmatism and institutionalised risk-aversion
Risk culture
Columbus would have fallen foul to today’s quest for predictability and expected outcomes
The precautionary principle
Forget penicillin
…or Viagra
…or post-it notes
…or the Internet
The quest for predictability
The process of minimising unpredictable outcomes is a process that raises pragmatism and the knowable to an operating principle
This is not how innovationis fostered
Fail often to succeed sooner
Success is the one per cent of your work that results from the 99 per cent that is called failure
The future?
The biggest danger we face is not that our expectations are unrealistic
Rather, it is that they are too low and we achieve them!
NEXT?
WHY?
WHY NOT!
Thank you
norman@wgrids.com
http://futures-diagnosis.com