by CKR
John Kao’s subtitle is “How America is losing its innovation edge, why it matters, and what we can do to get it back.” America’s economy now depends on how much we’re willing to buy of not-entirely-necessary goodies in innumerable variants. How long did it take you to find the designed-just-for you toothpaste in the twelve feet of shelf space devoted to dental cleaning products? We’ve just been through the breathless news and advertising coverage of the opportunities to buy at Christmas sales that begin at three in the morning, and the agonizing over the possibility that Americans will learn to share other kinds of gifts than those that must be bought in the store.
Can we return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when America provided the world with truly new products originated and produced here, when our GDP depended on something other than shopping until we drop? Do we need to? Better yet, can we come up with societal innovations to solve our problems?
The answers to those questions are not clear to me. I have to admit that I seldom do my consumerish duty in buying ready-made food or DVDs, not to mention clothing, which I hang on to for as long as it’s presentable. I’d rather see more suet for the birds in the meat counter, and less pre-soaked stuff for me that tastes all the same. I’d like to see America as the nation that I feel I helped to bring out of the Sputnik doldrums.
But people don’t innovate when they’re scared. They don’t innovate when they have to work 90 hours a week because their livelihood depends on it.
The trouble with John Kao’s book, for me anyway, is that it’s another business book. Kao follows the conventions: a bright optimism that if we follow his prescriptions all will be well; some neologisms to sprinkle into one’s vocabulary (wicked problems, dream spaces), the internet as a model. His recommendations may make sense, but they will never be realized whole. One wonders if he really expects that they could, because he ignores some significant political realities.
And yet, and yet. We need innovation very badly, and the idea has been sold to business that innovation is the answer to whatever ails them. Of course it is. If keeping on keeping on was the answer, they wouldn’t need anything new.
Do we need innovation in social and organizational structures to produce technical innovation? Or does it work the other way around? Or do we just need to go back to the old truisms and make them work?
Kao doesn’t answer any of these questions, and I can’t either. But his prescriptions have a backward-looking feel to them. Technological clusters like those west of Boston or in Silicon Valley. Improved education. A Department of Innovation in the federal government.
In that last, I see a tiny glow of hope. It’s a nineteen-sixties sort of answer, to be sure, and one must ask what institutionalization in yet another bureaucracy will do to stimulate innovation, but Kao does recognize that government has a role to play, other than getting out of the way of all those innovative entrepreneurs rushing to make money while they make all our lives better with seventy-five varieties of toothpaste. He floats the idea of balancing government support with free enterprise more convincingly when he looks at how San Diego made itself into a center of innovation when the defense money dried up.
With the present government, however, and with some of the candidates for president, governmental “interference” of this kind will be a hard sell, not to mention large swathes of the Congress.
The caucus results from Iowa look like the American people may be getting ready for the societal innovation we badly need. Innovation is a function of the need for it, the willingness of people to take chances, and how supportive the environment is. There’s little that can be done about the first factor, except for encouraging people’s perception of it. The second factor depends on many things, and the third is what Kao addresses. I suspect there’s just a bit of chance in how many of these aspects come together than can never be quite controlled.
Kao’s book will appeal to business and innovation junkies. It’s got some good ideas, but not enough to recommend it to a more general audience.
Update (1/6/08): Here are a couple of discussions that go to points that I think are important in innovation.