The creation myth: Why the innovation ecosystem requires more than financial capital to thrive

Some seven months after having announced its intentions in the budget, the Canadian government launched a review yesterday of its programs that support business R&D. A six-member panel was named and tasked with taking the next year to study the effectiveness of public support for private-sector R&D, with the underlying aim of coming up with some solutions to Canada’s lagging innovation and productivity levels. Ranking 16th in the 23-member OECD for its BERD-to-GDP ratio,* Canada has a lot of work to do on its private-sector support for research and development. Our businesses just aren’t keeping up with their international peers when it comes to investing in new ideas. In comparison, our public-sector support for R&D is quite enviable: Canada leads the G7 (though not the OECD) in higher-education expenditures on R&D. Yet there are myriad government programs to support businesses that want to gamble a bit on discovery.

So why the disconnect? I think the problem, on a large scale, is a philosophical issue. We just aren’t promoting a culture of innovation. Sure there are pockets of communities in which novelty is celebrated, where having a vision is welcomed. But this is far from ubiquitous.

The inclination to create, to solve problems and come up with new ways of seeing the world is just not pervasive enough in our culture. We need to celebrate - and moreover reward - those among us who question established orders and work to redescribe the world in workable new ways. And this has very little to do with money. I would not disagree that financial backing makes a huge difference in whether an idea can get off the ground, but it is a very narrow view indeed that sees money as the only factor in promoting innovation.

Case in point: the BERD figure indicates a ratio of financial allocation only: it quantifies how much a country’s business sector spends on R&D relative to the country’s GDP. What it doesn’t measure is output: how much R&D actually gets translated into viable technologies to improve people's lives. Nor does it measure the depth and impact of those improvements.

So, aside from making strategic budget allocations, what are governments to do? Well, for starters, they can adopt open data policies and get information online, in machine-readable formats, for everybody to use. Innovation requires having access to raw data, and providing those data is something inexpensive and easy that governments can do to give people access to the tools they need to create. Several cities have already started doing this. It may take a while before the effects are substantially measurable, but the point is, liberating government data is a big step towards fostering a culture where everyone can be thinking about innovation. To provide easy access to factual, statistical information is to equip people with the building blocks of new ideas.

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*BERD refers to “business expenditures on research and development”. This statistic means that Canadian businesses are behind the middle of the pack when compared to their OECD peers on how much they spend on R&D.

Here comes everybody (and their agenda)

In a recent article in the New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell takes on Clay Shirky by proposing that real social change does not and cannot take place in the world of social media, because online interaction enables only “weak ties” between individuals, and that real revolution relies on “strong ties” between people and issues.

In discussing the strength of adherents to an issue, Gladwell isolates relationships among people, and doesn’t really address the notion of commitment to personal change. He doesn’t address, for example, the possibility that individuals can make a difference by simply altering their everyday activities.

So I guess how you see this issue depends on what you think a revolution is. No doubt some people would make the distinction here between revolutionary and evolutionary movement, but I wonder if real social change is being effected in ways that don’t necessarily involve strong ties between individual and issue. Maybe not all causes require that people be passionately devoted to them. Maybe people are beginning to see, for example, the power of their spending habits, or the effectiveness of their everyday food choices, or the value of collaborating with strangers on community projects.

Maybe positive social change is being more effectively achieved not through violent upheaval, but through piecemeal nudges.

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I previously posted elsewhere on this topic:
I read Gladwell’s piece in the New Yorker earlier today and immediately thought, ‘Oh, Malcolm, you iconoclast, you.’ Taking on Clay Shirky is no simple effort. But his article, in typical Gladwellian style, is largely anecdotal and doesn’t really point to any hard data to back up his claims. The problem with his argument is that it mandates an either-or dynamic: either you’re lending your name to an online petition or you’re out in the field actively playing a role in the theatre of social change. (Or, as he would have it, you’re carrying out actions in a structured and disciplined hierarchy of instruction.)

And I’m not convinced that’s the way social movements are unfolding in our post-web2.0 theatre. Isn’t it possible that one is a complement to the other?

One major difference in the two sides is the way in which information is conveyed: written language versus speech. Gladwell seems to privilege the latter (an affinity that in postmodern terms is being a sucker for ‘présence’). But social movements have long used written/symbolic forms of communication (posters, books, pamphlets, graffiti, etc.) to reach a wider audience. Access to information is a critical factor in motivating people to act, and the network (democratic) model of spreading ideas has far greater reach and far more profound implications for individual choice than the centralized, strategic approach he’s promoting.