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Into the Abyss, Into the Light: Innovation at a crossroads in America
Colleagues,
A message from Rohit Shukla, CEO, Larta Institute & MedTechIQ member, in LARTA VOX...To subscribe to LARTA Vox: http://www.larta.org/VOX/SubscribeToVOX.aspx
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Things are not as bad as they seem, nor as good as they should be.
By Rohit K. Shukla, CEO, Larta Institute
Much of our collective energy has gone into discussing, arguing about, fretting and moaning over the threat of imminent collapse - of the economy, of our way of life, of the world at large. A crisis mentality has clearly overtaken much of the world's thinking, at a time when we face other pressures - environmental degradation, political instability, food shortages and the increasing, ever-present threat of global pandemics.
Yet, equally clearly, there seems to be a growing sense of optimism, a sense that, punditry aside, no set of issues should be stripped down to the navel, so to speak, in order to get a handle on the ways out of the binge of excess and hubris that has brought us to this pass. Indeed, the opportunity that this time of widely-acknowledged crisis brings is unparalleled: we can do things that otherwise might have continued to be encumbered by an under-employment of imagination!
Our new Administration has already been criticized, both for overreaching ambition and underwhelming continuity. But in its embrace of the opportunity - by affirming that we should build the foundations of a new kind of economy, where new solutions work off a wave of innovation prompted by the government's - and the public's - compelling interest and by affirming that the problems of broken health care, energy profligacy/environmental degradation and poor food and nutrition are "three peas in a pod", the Administration has restored to the frontline of public policy the great role of innovation in America. In the not-so-distant past, we have been called upon by our government to participate in a mission of national importance and greater purpose, and to focus on a specific goal, and the result has been a flowering of innovation in both intended and unexpected ways. Two specific examples: the dream of travel across the beautiful landscape of America (the highway system under Eisenhower, and the consequent explosion of intrastate commerce, increase in mobility and the creation of a great dispersion of talent across the country), the conquest of the moon (and the attendant spurts and advances in a number of fields of science and engineering, under the Kennedy Administration, including material sciences, propulsion, battery technology, communication systems, and many other areas where "NASA-approved is seen as a pinnacle of achievement). Another example, now widely known, is the Internet itself, uninvented by Gore but brought to the forefront of our competitiveness under the preachers in the Clinton Administration.
But, without a doubt, such an integrated approach to economic growth will require a rethinking of innovation policy across the board. The incrementalism that has accompanied the growth of science and technology policy in America will have to be replaced with a mission-focused employment of the various pieces of the innovation puzzle in America, so that the proper role of the entrepreneur is recognized alongside the better-heeled and appreciated researcher, university provost or education lobbyist. It will need a reassessment of the extent to which federal funding can be more intelligently marshaled in support not only of basic research but in commercialization of that research. It will need an unparalleled coordination between federal agencies, which have never been inspired or provided with the incentives to do so. Congress controls the purse strings, and given how the appropriation process works, it is no surprise that funding for research is sprinkled like angel dust across America, sometimes for the purpose of jumpstarting something that isn't alive and is thus forced into an unnecessary existence only by the will of individuals who happen to reside in that location and by their eager sponsors in Congress. In our well-intentioned desire to ensure that no part of the country is spared the generosity of federal funding, we have often erred on the side of entitlement.
Given such largesse (the American higher education system is well-funded, by any standards, although the per capita argument is often invoked to make the opposite case), it is no wonder that the country's science and technology programs have invited the best and the brightest from across the world. And, in a tribute to their effectiveness, they succeeded wildly by any measure, in providing the best education and the best environment for these graduates to absorb, inculcate and be inspired. Yet, the fact that many foreign-born graduates are opting to go back to their home countries, to ride the great wave of innovation that the U.S., through no design, has unleashed across the globe, has provided grounds for panic among university administrators and teachers. The decline of interest in America's bright young people in science and engineering has been going on for thirty years, and so long as we have been welcoming of immigrants, that trend has been neutralized to some extent. With other countries providing a powerful magnet to their bright young ones still on our shores, we cannot (and should not) count on this continued supply, or so we are told.
It seems, despite the many slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, we need to see the forest for the trees. Things are not as bad as they seem, but neither are they as good as they can be. Clearly, new perspectives are needed in an America on the cusp of change.
First, innovation is only recognized and is only replicated, recycled, recharged, refined and made more broadly applicable when it emerges from the lab, is pursued by "imagineers" and entrepreneurs, is dissected and deployed deeply and broadly, and finds as yet unseen applications through the doggedness and industry of entrepreneurs and users. Often it will spawn its own wave of creativity and continuous innovation, as has happened with new media, information technology, and computing. Imitation in the pursuit of something new is also part of this wave of innovation. Even imitation can give rise to inventive innovation. Both Japan, in an earlier decade, and Korea, more recently, have demonstrated this extremely well, in optics, miniaturization, consumer electronics, automobile engineering, telecommunications technology and so on. India and China, through very different pathways, have similarly pursued, and have (at least in the case of China) centrally planned, the adoption of such a scheme of innovation by imitation, leading to innovation by invention. America's role in the worldwide scheme of innovation is more complex, less understood, and thus easily bemoaned. Our competitiveness is suffering, the mantra goes, because we do not grow our own innovators, and we cannot keep the ones who used to stay on here. But the fact is, the American consumer, and the ingenious young American, has kept innovation at the highest level by consistently interacting on a personal level with the products of innovation, and thus creating new ways of both using those innovations, and creating mini waves of inventive innovation. Take the case of interactive technology, where users from young kids to adolescent thirtysomethings have pushed the envelope to such an extent that the tools of virtual reality, for example, are now more widespread than ever before, and will lead to a completely new way of creating products, and of thinking about creativity in general. Consider the influence of social networking and its ability to inspire collaboration outside the boundaries of location and space.
Yes, we do need to inspire kids and younger Americans by demonstrating the promise of new technology and to open their minds to the great missions embodied in the "three peas in a pod", and I believe they are ready. Yes, we need to reinvigorate our schools across the board, introducing the tools that have made their experience of science fun when stripped of the sternness and in approachability with which communities have regarded them. I have met many innovators who have applied the tools of social networking and interactive gaming to new ways of learning and teaching, and the only thing stopping their use is our lack of imagination, our skepticism in the face of new opportunities and our hidebound systems of procurement that act as brakes on any change.
No, we should not be wringing our hands over the relocation of foreign graduates back to their home countries. It is a mark of cowardice and arrogance to suggest that their role in backfilling our demand should continue, just when innovation and accomplishment in science and technology has the prospect of lifting several countries inhabited by creative, yearning people out of their stagnant pasts and into promising futures. I have worked with hundreds of foreign-born innovators, whose appreciation of the magic of America will never cease, and whose interest in continuing to work with and through America is matched by an understanding of the ubiquity of innovation, of the absence of the dogma of straight-line innovation.
But things are not as good as they should be. We must bring a sense of purpose and mission to the great federal agencies that, collectively, contribute the overwhelming share of financial resources to our research regimes in the U.S. They operate under mandates that have been added incrementally over many decades, yet see their budgets often sidetracked by earmarks to projects that often exist purely out of a sense of entitlement, as I have noted above. Insisting on the "fair share" principle as applied to every corner of America often distorts the playing field, rather than making it even, by providing the illusion of pedigree, yet that is also often what the agencies have to put up with. Congress often sees them as piggy banks. And universities often see them as existing purely for the benefit of funding their programs. There is no incentive for them to truly collaborate, and often this leads to them operating as silos, much as so many of our great universities do. They are islands in the storm, ready to be overwhelmed and otherwise operating in splendid isolation. Yet even here, things are not as bad as they seem. Out of these circumstances, they have created extraordinary things, furthered research in areas where advances are revolutionary and even where incremental, lead to a consistent march forward in discovery and deployment of technology. Of greater concern, is their isolation from commercialization. It might seem appropriate in these times, that they are not infected by the gore surrounding filthy lucre. But frankly, it is time for the public at large to see continued, tangible returns on the investment of moneys into research, via tangible products and services. Funding for commercialization should be increased relative to research; certainly commercialization should be elevated to the same exalted plane we have reserved for basic research, and it should not be seen as an afterthought, specific to some smaller corner of the overall pie.
Many of our biggest challenges in federally-inspired innovation can be met with a new mission-driven federal government, as the Administration clearly understands. Each of the fields embodied in each of the "three peas in a pod", depends on advances in other fields, especially at the level of practice in the field, such as sensor technology, RFID and new materials, to name a few. Instead of funding continuing cycles of research that keep faculty and grant writers alive in any of these areas, we should insist that this research uses evidence of how these technologies are working in the field, and focuses some part of ensuing research to confront new challenges faced in the integration of knowledge in those areas (environmental technologies and energy, health care and information technology, health care and environmental technologies, disease and food and nutrition, food technology and environmental technologies, and so on).
If we are serious about commercialization, coordination between research and practice, collaboration between agencies, and outreach to the world's innovators, we can expect a great flowering of both basic research and tangible products (many of which will fail the test of time or use or both) in energy, environmental technologies ("cleantech"), health care (including information technology, which has been an important issue in NIH funding), and food technology (including environmentally-benign pest control, organic foods, animal stockmanship, geomapping and a host of other areas).
What an exciting time to ponder the prescriptive Chinese saying: "May you live in interesting times!
To subscribe to LARTA Vox: http://www.larta.org/VOX/SubscribeToVOX.aspx
A message from Rohit Shukla, CEO, Larta Institute & MedTechIQ member, in LARTA VOX...To subscribe to LARTA Vox: http://www.larta.org/VOX/SubscribeToVOX.aspx
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Things are not as bad as they seem, nor as good as they should be.
By Rohit K. Shukla, CEO, Larta Institute
Much of our collective energy has gone into discussing, arguing about, fretting and moaning over the threat of imminent collapse - of the economy, of our way of life, of the world at large. A crisis mentality has clearly overtaken much of the world's thinking, at a time when we face other pressures - environmental degradation, political instability, food shortages and the increasing, ever-present threat of global pandemics.
Yet, equally clearly, there seems to be a growing sense of optimism, a sense that, punditry aside, no set of issues should be stripped down to the navel, so to speak, in order to get a handle on the ways out of the binge of excess and hubris that has brought us to this pass. Indeed, the opportunity that this time of widely-acknowledged crisis brings is unparalleled: we can do things that otherwise might have continued to be encumbered by an under-employment of imagination!
Our new Administration has already been criticized, both for overreaching ambition and underwhelming continuity. But in its embrace of the opportunity - by affirming that we should build the foundations of a new kind of economy, where new solutions work off a wave of innovation prompted by the government's - and the public's - compelling interest and by affirming that the problems of broken health care, energy profligacy/environmental degradation and poor food and nutrition are "three peas in a pod", the Administration has restored to the frontline of public policy the great role of innovation in America. In the not-so-distant past, we have been called upon by our government to participate in a mission of national importance and greater purpose, and to focus on a specific goal, and the result has been a flowering of innovation in both intended and unexpected ways. Two specific examples: the dream of travel across the beautiful landscape of America (the highway system under Eisenhower, and the consequent explosion of intrastate commerce, increase in mobility and the creation of a great dispersion of talent across the country), the conquest of the moon (and the attendant spurts and advances in a number of fields of science and engineering, under the Kennedy Administration, including material sciences, propulsion, battery technology, communication systems, and many other areas where "NASA-approved is seen as a pinnacle of achievement). Another example, now widely known, is the Internet itself, uninvented by Gore but brought to the forefront of our competitiveness under the preachers in the Clinton Administration.
But, without a doubt, such an integrated approach to economic growth will require a rethinking of innovation policy across the board. The incrementalism that has accompanied the growth of science and technology policy in America will have to be replaced with a mission-focused employment of the various pieces of the innovation puzzle in America, so that the proper role of the entrepreneur is recognized alongside the better-heeled and appreciated researcher, university provost or education lobbyist. It will need a reassessment of the extent to which federal funding can be more intelligently marshaled in support not only of basic research but in commercialization of that research. It will need an unparalleled coordination between federal agencies, which have never been inspired or provided with the incentives to do so. Congress controls the purse strings, and given how the appropriation process works, it is no surprise that funding for research is sprinkled like angel dust across America, sometimes for the purpose of jumpstarting something that isn't alive and is thus forced into an unnecessary existence only by the will of individuals who happen to reside in that location and by their eager sponsors in Congress. In our well-intentioned desire to ensure that no part of the country is spared the generosity of federal funding, we have often erred on the side of entitlement.
Given such largesse (the American higher education system is well-funded, by any standards, although the per capita argument is often invoked to make the opposite case), it is no wonder that the country's science and technology programs have invited the best and the brightest from across the world. And, in a tribute to their effectiveness, they succeeded wildly by any measure, in providing the best education and the best environment for these graduates to absorb, inculcate and be inspired. Yet, the fact that many foreign-born graduates are opting to go back to their home countries, to ride the great wave of innovation that the U.S., through no design, has unleashed across the globe, has provided grounds for panic among university administrators and teachers. The decline of interest in America's bright young people in science and engineering has been going on for thirty years, and so long as we have been welcoming of immigrants, that trend has been neutralized to some extent. With other countries providing a powerful magnet to their bright young ones still on our shores, we cannot (and should not) count on this continued supply, or so we are told.
It seems, despite the many slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, we need to see the forest for the trees. Things are not as bad as they seem, but neither are they as good as they can be. Clearly, new perspectives are needed in an America on the cusp of change.
First, innovation is only recognized and is only replicated, recycled, recharged, refined and made more broadly applicable when it emerges from the lab, is pursued by "imagineers" and entrepreneurs, is dissected and deployed deeply and broadly, and finds as yet unseen applications through the doggedness and industry of entrepreneurs and users. Often it will spawn its own wave of creativity and continuous innovation, as has happened with new media, information technology, and computing. Imitation in the pursuit of something new is also part of this wave of innovation. Even imitation can give rise to inventive innovation. Both Japan, in an earlier decade, and Korea, more recently, have demonstrated this extremely well, in optics, miniaturization, consumer electronics, automobile engineering, telecommunications technology and so on. India and China, through very different pathways, have similarly pursued, and have (at least in the case of China) centrally planned, the adoption of such a scheme of innovation by imitation, leading to innovation by invention. America's role in the worldwide scheme of innovation is more complex, less understood, and thus easily bemoaned. Our competitiveness is suffering, the mantra goes, because we do not grow our own innovators, and we cannot keep the ones who used to stay on here. But the fact is, the American consumer, and the ingenious young American, has kept innovation at the highest level by consistently interacting on a personal level with the products of innovation, and thus creating new ways of both using those innovations, and creating mini waves of inventive innovation. Take the case of interactive technology, where users from young kids to adolescent thirtysomethings have pushed the envelope to such an extent that the tools of virtual reality, for example, are now more widespread than ever before, and will lead to a completely new way of creating products, and of thinking about creativity in general. Consider the influence of social networking and its ability to inspire collaboration outside the boundaries of location and space.
Yes, we do need to inspire kids and younger Americans by demonstrating the promise of new technology and to open their minds to the great missions embodied in the "three peas in a pod", and I believe they are ready. Yes, we need to reinvigorate our schools across the board, introducing the tools that have made their experience of science fun when stripped of the sternness and in approachability with which communities have regarded them. I have met many innovators who have applied the tools of social networking and interactive gaming to new ways of learning and teaching, and the only thing stopping their use is our lack of imagination, our skepticism in the face of new opportunities and our hidebound systems of procurement that act as brakes on any change.
No, we should not be wringing our hands over the relocation of foreign graduates back to their home countries. It is a mark of cowardice and arrogance to suggest that their role in backfilling our demand should continue, just when innovation and accomplishment in science and technology has the prospect of lifting several countries inhabited by creative, yearning people out of their stagnant pasts and into promising futures. I have worked with hundreds of foreign-born innovators, whose appreciation of the magic of America will never cease, and whose interest in continuing to work with and through America is matched by an understanding of the ubiquity of innovation, of the absence of the dogma of straight-line innovation.
But things are not as good as they should be. We must bring a sense of purpose and mission to the great federal agencies that, collectively, contribute the overwhelming share of financial resources to our research regimes in the U.S. They operate under mandates that have been added incrementally over many decades, yet see their budgets often sidetracked by earmarks to projects that often exist purely out of a sense of entitlement, as I have noted above. Insisting on the "fair share" principle as applied to every corner of America often distorts the playing field, rather than making it even, by providing the illusion of pedigree, yet that is also often what the agencies have to put up with. Congress often sees them as piggy banks. And universities often see them as existing purely for the benefit of funding their programs. There is no incentive for them to truly collaborate, and often this leads to them operating as silos, much as so many of our great universities do. They are islands in the storm, ready to be overwhelmed and otherwise operating in splendid isolation. Yet even here, things are not as bad as they seem. Out of these circumstances, they have created extraordinary things, furthered research in areas where advances are revolutionary and even where incremental, lead to a consistent march forward in discovery and deployment of technology. Of greater concern, is their isolation from commercialization. It might seem appropriate in these times, that they are not infected by the gore surrounding filthy lucre. But frankly, it is time for the public at large to see continued, tangible returns on the investment of moneys into research, via tangible products and services. Funding for commercialization should be increased relative to research; certainly commercialization should be elevated to the same exalted plane we have reserved for basic research, and it should not be seen as an afterthought, specific to some smaller corner of the overall pie.
Many of our biggest challenges in federally-inspired innovation can be met with a new mission-driven federal government, as the Administration clearly understands. Each of the fields embodied in each of the "three peas in a pod", depends on advances in other fields, especially at the level of practice in the field, such as sensor technology, RFID and new materials, to name a few. Instead of funding continuing cycles of research that keep faculty and grant writers alive in any of these areas, we should insist that this research uses evidence of how these technologies are working in the field, and focuses some part of ensuing research to confront new challenges faced in the integration of knowledge in those areas (environmental technologies and energy, health care and information technology, health care and environmental technologies, disease and food and nutrition, food technology and environmental technologies, and so on).
If we are serious about commercialization, coordination between research and practice, collaboration between agencies, and outreach to the world's innovators, we can expect a great flowering of both basic research and tangible products (many of which will fail the test of time or use or both) in energy, environmental technologies ("cleantech"), health care (including information technology, which has been an important issue in NIH funding), and food technology (including environmentally-benign pest control, organic foods, animal stockmanship, geomapping and a host of other areas).
What an exciting time to ponder the prescriptive Chinese saying: "May you live in interesting times!
To subscribe to LARTA Vox: http://www.larta.org/VOX/SubscribeToVOX.aspx
Views: 3
Comment
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Comment by Ronald J. Pion MD on February 9, 2009 at 4:30pm
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Rohit:
Thank you for your continued search for and invitation to those whose research explorations are deserving of greater exposure. Since LARTA first began you and your team have inspired many towards new opportunities and higher levels of growth and development.
Ron Pion MD
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