Creating an Innovation Culture
Dr Peter Ellyard
Preferred Futures, Melbourne
Synopsis
The ingredients of an innovation culture is described. Such a culture is essential for the future economic prosperity of Australia, and for the creation of motivated, self realising individuals in the 21st century. The text is written as a scenario set in the year 2010.
The following is a scenario which describes some elements of the Education System of the Year 2010.
Over the past 50 years Australian industry policy has been directed to repairing and modernising ailing and declining industries ,while it has largely ignored the creation and establishment of new industries. Our industry policy lacked vision and entrepreneurship. We failed to visualise the opportunities in emerging 21st century industries and to position our nation as a leader in these new emerging industries. Australian industry policy has therefore been based on catching up and seeking to achieve benchmark levels compared with International Best Practice. Such a policy merely ensured that we aspired to be as good as anybody else, not better. Industry policy now involves ensuring that Australia achieves global leadership in new emerging industries. Our LCs have been part of the program to ensure that people have the skills and capabilities to assume leadership in these new emerging industries.
We recognised in the 1990s that great natural resources endowments do not guarantee economic prosperity, and that success is largely dependent on developing the skills and capabilities of people . However knowledge was not the most critical issue : the most critical issue was the development of an innovation culture : Australian folklore is rich with stories of bright Australian ideas being lost to Australia because of insufficient entrepreneurial and financial support, and these ideas being used to generate wealth for people in other countries. Economic success now depends on knowledge and it is even more dependent upon brainpower than previously. Ultimate economic success in a planetary society goes to those countries, institutions, companies and individuals who best use their inventiveness, intelligence and cleverness. In the 1980s we talked about establishing a clever country. However we failed to develop a coherent structure to realise this vision. The fact that Australia in the 1990s was not a clever country was not due to economic causes. The emphasis in the 1980s and 1990s on micro economic reform, important though it was, failed to fully recognise the critical importance of cultural factors. Economists continued to believe that our economic problems had economic causes and prescribed economic solutions. Our culture was inventive : it encouraged good ideas. However it was not innovative : it did not use these ideas to create prosperity and jobs. We had an inventive culture but not an innovative one.
An innovation culture develops a nation of job makers rather than job takers. Education in the 1990s produced many people who were prepared for jobs which were not there. This was because our structural adjustment overly emphasised modernising the existing industrial base with a related downsizing of labour, without emphasising the envisioning and establishment of new 21st Century, industries which would employ most of the high quality graduates of our educational system. Therefore we needed to look ahead to anticipate what longer term future markets wanted and then create the innovations and enterprises to best service those future markets.
An innovative person is one who is both creative and enterprising. The great bases of creativity are the disciplinary groups of the arts and humanities, the natural and social sciences and the technologies. Most Australians are now knowledgeable of the major principles and concepts in all three areas. There is also convergence within each of these three disciplinary groups and between them. In the late 1990s there was a recognition that new interdisciplinary approaches were needed to deal with products of this convergence, such as mechatronics, optoelectronics and multimedia. We now promote an education system which engenders respect for all these three great areas of creativity and indepth knowledge in at least one of them. We also promote the capacity to integrate knowledge from all these bases into new integrated forms of knowledge. The greatest gains in knowledge have been in areas where disciplines overlap and converge. In the past our education system had made it difficult for students to study these different disciplines concurrently and to be given the chance to integrate learning from them.
In the same vein many of our environmental problems were due to the fact that our too inflexible education system did not permit a person to study both natural and social sciences together. People learned ecology as part of a natural science education , and economics as part of a social science education , and rarely the two together. Economists knew little ecology, while ecologists knew little economics. Both words derive from the same word the Greek word, oikos meaning home. It is hardly surprising that economics and ecology always used to always be in conflict in the 20th century
In a 1988 paper, written for OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI), Colin Ball introduced the concept that, if people were to thrive in the 21st century they would need to simultaneously develop capabilities in three different educational arenas. He named each of these Educational Passports., based on the idea that a passport, helps to define a person's right of passage. He suggested that these three Passports are:
* an academic passport which is the traditional role of education, The visas in this passport consist of the capabilities of literacy and numeracy, and cultural linguistic, scientific, artistic, technological and social knowledge which enables a person to play a meaningful and self fulfilling role in society and culture .
* a vocational passport which focuses on the specific education necessary for the effective performance of work, such as technological, financial, management, and marketing knowledge, in a world of rapid technological and social change.
*an enterprise passport which contains the curriculum to promote the development of enterprising people. Colin Ball and his colleagues developed the following description of an enterprising person:
An enterprising individual has a positive, flexible and adaptable disposition towards change, seeing it as normal, and as an opportunity rather than a problem. To see change in this way, an enterprising individual has a security born of self-confidence, and is at ease when dealing with insecurity, risks, difficulty and the unknown. An enterprising individual has the capacity to initiate creative ideas ... develop them, and see them through into action in a determined manner. An enterprising individual is able, even anxious, to take responsibility and is an effective communicator, negotiator, influencer, planner, and organiser. An enterprising individual is active, confident, and purposeful, not passive, uncertain and dependent ... (Ball,Plant and Knight,1989).
In previous decades many of our people were unenterprising by this definition, and so we sought to create a nation of enterprising people. The Finn, Mayer and Carmichael Reports, which introduced the concept of competencies, were presented to the Commonwealth Government in 1991 and 1992. These reports did however commence the journey towards the development of a innovation culture. They made a mistake however of placing competencies under the existing vocational passport rather than in a new and separate enterprise passport of equal value to the other two passports .
Many people tried to list the capabilities or competencies which are needed for the development of an enterprising individual. One list, which is based on an initial list developed by David Turner includes:
* Assessing strengths and weaknesses
* Making decisions
* Working cooperatively in teams and groups
* Planning time and energy
* Carrying out agreed responsibilities
* Negotiating
* Dealing with power and authority
* Solving problems
* Resolving conflict
* Coping with stress and tension
* Evaluating performance
* Communicating both verbally and non-verbally
* Developing strategic visions for self and organisations
* Thinking and intervening strategically and systematically to shape the future
All these competencies can be developed by practice. Australia is now a major exporter of products, services and technologies which develop enterprise skills. These include virtual reality programs and programs which incorporate role playing and work experience. All of us develop our enterprise competencies on a continuing bases as a part of normal learning. Many KNs specialise in the teaching and assessment of enterprise competencies.