Innovation and leapfrogging

Peter Day’s article, “Universities challenged” on the BBC News website this morning discusses some of the assumptions about innovation and the role of higher education in innovative systems. Day hits on some interesting points, but I wouldn’t say that he reveals any particularly profound ideas. Nevertheless, he does point out the problems with the tendency to connect innovation to universities and research and development. This is important for the development context, because many developing countries lack the infrastructure, in higher education and the commercial sector, that this assumption about innovation makes a prerequisite for establishing cultures of innovation. And innovation is important for development in today’s global society because the global market requires it. In an age where information and knowledge are easily transferred all over the world, societies find themselves with few options as to how to operate in this marketplace – they can either service the innovators, provide raw materials to the innovators, or they can themselves innovate. But, here the question of how we define “innovation” becomes crucial.
First we have to confront the assumption that Day discusses. The assumption is that research and development in higher education will have commercial applications. This assumption has been challenged many times by many people in many places. Stephen Allott, who Day talks about, is not entirely unique in this, nor are his credentials much more surprising than others who have raised this issue. For example, Herb Baum, CEO of Dial, has famously claimed that innovation is not R&D, and has gone on to promote innovation within Dial among all his employees to feed the R&D department, not the other way around. 3M is another interesting example of a company that has acknowledged that innovation happens everywhere and anywhere and is not necessarily a product of R&D.
What is being suggested here is that innovation is the generation and dissemination of ideas, not bringing them to market, and examination of the history of ideas supports this. There was an entertaining and interesting show on the Discovery Channel here in the US recently titled, “How William Shatner Changed the World”, that discussed how the science fiction TV show “Star Trek” influenced the development of several technologies. The authors of Star Trek acknowledge that they didn’t know about the technologies that they were proposing, they just thought they were cool and fit with their vision of the future. It wasn’t up to them to make these technologies work, they just had to make them plausible. Making them work was someone else’s job, and indeed, those people eventually came along and did make them work (or are making them work). Science fiction is full of examples like these. For example, the grandfather of all superheroes, Doc Savage, had sonar several years before this technology was developed for practical use (I don’t remember which book (The Polar Treasure, maybe?). May as well read them all, very entertaining). The point is that innovation comes from personal or communal knowledge and vision and the ability to influence the right people with ideas.
Innovation is consistent with (and in my view, required for) leapfrogging development. In this sense, leapfrogging is not about implementing the right technology, it is about using the knowledge available to generate ideas that can put societies in a strategic position in the global marketplace. All societies/communities have a knowledge base. The question is about their ability to stake out their knowledge claim and how they eventually use it. I’m making it sound easy, but believe me I know it’s not. But, I’m only vaguely suggesting an approach for development, it’s more a way of looking at things at this stage.
Finally, Day makes a big deal about the lack of research on innovation. I don’t agree. I think that there is a lot of good research out there on innovation. Some good starting points (these may be biased toward my view of innovation) would include Bengt-Åke Lundvall, Erik von Hippel, Richard Florida (he discusses “creativity”, but still relevant) and many many more.