Pothole #2: The Tendency to Rely on a Centrally Planned and
Top Down Approach to Innovation. (September 17, 2011)
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News & Views item - September 2011 |
Pothole #2: The Tendency to Rely on a Centrally Planned and
Top Down Approach to Innovation. (September 17, 2011)
A sometimes reader of TFW brought to our attention a blog in CNN's globalpublicsquare by John Kao who we are told is "dubbed 'Mr. Creativity' by The Economist, is the chairman for the institute of large scale innovation and author of Innovation Nation".
While this particular piece is one of a series pertaining to Mr Kao's recent trip to China in search of innovation and the pros and cons on how China is going about fostering it, what struck our correspondent is what Mr Kao refers to as Pothole #2 and how it seems pertinent to Senator Carr's Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) approach to "supporting" Australian innovation.
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Pothole #2 is the tendency to rely on a centrally planned and top down approach to innovation. The Chinese approach to motivating innovation by linking benefits to the production of scientific papers and patents for example may be of some practical utility. But it also speaks to a nostalgia for an industrial model of productivity made up of objective inputs and outputs, metrics, and transform algorithms that fly in the face of much of what we know of as disruptive innovation, which can be inherently inefficient, nonlinear and on the edge. |
That which François Jacob refers to as "night science".
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