April, 2011 | Spencer Low

24Apr/110

The rise of innovation in China and India — and what it really means for the US

In an interview with strategy+business, Adam Segal, a Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that the threat of China and India out-innovating the US is overstated. The author of recently published Advantage: How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge believes that the rise of Asia is more of an opportunity than a threat, and that the US still has a window of opportunity to build on its strengths while China and India are still finding their footing. Here are some of his thoughts on the three countries:

China

Policymakers and business leaders have been overly focused on measuring what I call the hardware of innovation: the amount of spending on R&D and the number of engineers and scientists, patents, and publications. And whereas the hardware has clearly been built up in China, what I call the software — the political, cultural, and social institutions and understandings that help move ideas from lab to marketplace — are lagging behind. Without the software in place, the whole is much less than the sum of its parts. The Chinese themselves admit that they’ve put a lot in, but they’re not really getting a lot out.

India

We always talk about the Indian Institutes of Technology [IITs] and Indian Institutes of Management [IIMs], both of which have trained some of India’s top business leaders and leading entrepreneurs. But they’re just a small part of a much bigger education system in India, in which the vast majority of universities stress rote memorization, use outdated curricula, and provide no instruction in English. […] Some argue that if you look at Infosys and Wipro and those types of companies, they’ve moved up so far in the value chain that the type of R&D they’re doing for Western companies is increasingly sophisticated and creative, which is, I think, probably true. But those gains aren’t really captured by the Indian economy. It’s still the foreign firms that are capturing the gains.

United States

The traditional model for how the U.S. works in science and technology was like the old energy grid: the U.S. thought of the ideas and then sent them out to the rest of the world, in the same way you generate energy and you send it out. Instead, the U.S. should start to think of itself as a smart grid. The idea of a smart grid is that you can determine where the greatest demand is and have the ability to moderate and change the flow of energy, but also that people can feed energy back into it. […] Increasingly, inventions and ideas will be happening in the places where the U.S. used to just send ideas. And the U.S. has to be able to figure out what those ideas are and how it can apply them to markets and develop them.

Source article:

The Innovation Advantage (strategy+business)

Filed under: Design & Innovation, Geopolitics No Comments

17Apr/110

How do you choose a job: the company or where it’s located?

Charles Landry in London. Photograph by Julian Anderson (from Strategy + Business)

In the past, most people picked their jobs based on the companies they wanted to work for. No longer: A 2008 study by the Chicago-based CEOs for Cities found that 64% of highly mobile knowledge workers were more likely to choose a job because of where an organization was located than because of the organization itself. To quote strategy+business's article on the urban thinker Charles Landry:

To secure a prosperous future, individuals need to put themselves in settings that enhance their ability to build both the relationships and the skills they will need to support themselves over the course of a lifetime. Less dependent on companies than they were in the past, knowledge workers have increasingly come to recognize that putting place first works to their advantage.

Business leaders have been slow to recognize the key role of place in attracting talent and stirring its innovative potential. As a result, many companies continue to over-focus on building internal capacity rather than seeking to strengthen the regions to which they need to attract skilled people.

Charles Landry, often associated with the "creative cities" movement espoused by Toronto-based Richard Florida (author of The Rise of the Creative Class), defines the "creative class" more broadly to include the oxymoron-sounding "creative bureaucrats." Interesting, the concept came to Landry while he was working on a project in Calgary where he came into contact with innovative, creative municipal staff (many years before Naheed Nenshi becoming mayor).

Landry is also highly passionate about the importance of the street, which he considers the basic infrastructural unit. Landry describes the three characteristics that distinguish great collections of streets: distinction, variety, and flow:

Distinction means avoiding sameness, offering an experience that cannot be had somewhere else. Most places accomplish this by means of an iconography that lets you know that here is not the same as there. This is the problem with global brands, Landry says; although the streets that welcome such brands may aspire to exclusivity, the brands’ ubiquity undermines that principle. As soon as a great street like rue Saint-Honoré or Calle de la Reina becomes colonized by global retailers, people looking for an individual experience start to avoid it. Sameness creates boredom, and a hub cannot afford to be boring: It exists in order to stimulate.

Variety means creating a way for the small and large to exist together, a well-known company next to a quirky enterprise, a café alongside an art store adjoining a market. Variety exists when an extraordinary, remarkable destination is webbed within an ordinary, expected urban environment. Zoning codes kill variety, Landry reminds his listeners, as does the constant turnover that results from a focus on maximizing rents; the demise of a beloved institution will undermine every business on the street.

Flow, the key concept of the hub, is also essential to the street, being manifested in a particular and idiosyncratic way. Flow results from giving people the ability to control their pace and to stop at will to consider what might be available. “This is what flow does not look like!” Landry cries, showing a flurry of pictures taken around the corner on Oxford Street, where a cavalcade of signage supplemented by concrete barriers attempts to direct pedestrians along a specific route. “People resist directions that attempt to control their movements,” he points out. “And the smarter they are, the more they resent it. Urban engineers who come up with signage like this are just trying to keep things moving. They work from a traffic metaphor — the goal is to move people along and out.”

Source article: