This article did disturb me, it triggered a number of validations in my own mind. Once you get past the opening rant about the infamous Juicero juicer, that has now been used as an illustration of how investors funded something that automates something that you can do faster by hand.

The article opens up the doors to questioning much that is going on under the Silicon Valley umbrella. The juicer got funding of $120m from a number of blue-chip VC’s but it was not this that actually disturbs me, it was this “ant-innovation” tag the writer was attaching to (North) America.

The article goes deeper in questioning where we are in our innovation thinking. We do have a real innovation growth dilemma that we can’t lay at the door of Silicon Valley alone, it is part of the Western world’s current sickness. It has lost that ability to take a positive risk in so much, ‘kicking the can down the road’ for others to resolve, be these societal, educational, health, infrastructural or institutional reforming and so much more. All really important innovation opportunities.

Has the US become “profoundly anti-innovation” as stated?

The writer suggests

“At the root of the problem is the story we tell ourselves about innovation. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a lone genius disappears into a garage, preferably in Palo Alto, and emerges with an invention that changes the world. The engine of technological progress is the entrepreneur – the fast-moving, risk-loving, rule-breaking visionary in the mold of Steve Jobs.

This story has been so widely repeated as to become a cliche. It’s also inaccurate. Contrary to popular belief, entrepreneurs typically make terrible innovators. Left to its own devices, the private sector is far more likely to impede technological progress than to advance it. That’s because real innovation is very expensive to produce: it involves pouring extravagant sums of money into research projects that may fail, or at the very least may never yield a commercially viable product. In other words, it requires a lot of risks – something that, myth-making aside, capitalist firms have little appetite for”

I started to identify with the second paragraph of this. Real innovation is very expensive to produce and it is the appetite for risk that has been lost in America as it has been in Europe. That I strongly relate too as we have certainly lost that corporate ‘will’ to pursue much that can provide significant breakthroughs in products and new services, but is this because it is such a volatile, transforming time? Can we be bolder and more determined to differentiate ourselves or do we stay tucked into the pack, like a long distant runner, waiting for something (someone) to break away, hopefully, able to equally ‘kick in’ and stay in touch, still hopeful we will be in a position to win but mostly remain a fast follower only?

Are we committing suicide with a lack of innovation? Are we crushing real innovation?

Is it is suggested in the article, the USA is showing signs of a country committing economic suicide?” The writer’s observation: “Innovation drives economic growth. It boosts productivity, making it possible to create more wealth with less labor. When economies don’t innovate, the result is stagnation, inequality, and the whole horizon of hopelessness that has come to define the lives of most working people today”. 

I certainly can’t disagree with this, that Companies do need the breakthroughs to build their business but they do seem very reluctant to build this risk mentality in recent years. Innovation has been taking a back seat to shoring up our balance sheets, delivering increasing profits and shedding people and ‘unproductive’ assets that do not fit the business today. The longer-term has equally been put into the back seat, alongside innovation.

The sad loss of the real innovation risk investment?

Breakthrough innovation needs heavy investment, the writer reminds us:

“So where does the money come from? The government. As the economist, Mariana Mazzucato has shown, nearly every major innovation since the second world war has required a big push from the public sector, for an obvious reason: the public sector can afford to take risks that the private sector can’t.

Conventional wisdom says that market forces foster innovation. In fact, it’s the government’s insulation from market forces that has historically made it such a successful innovator. It doesn’t have to compete, and it’s not at the mercy of investors demanding a share of its profits. It’s also far more generous with the fruits of its scientific labor: no private company would ever be so foolish as to constantly give away innovations it has generated at enormous expense for free, but this is exactly what the government does. The dynamic should be familiar with the financial crisis: the taxpayer absorbs the risk, and the investor reaps the reward.

Again I feel uncomfortable and I would love to disagree with this but it is true in the majority of cases. Truly innovation breakthroughs have come through Government investments. When you look back or read it does seem true that most of the innovation breakthrough for transforming have their roots in publicly funded research. As the writer puts it (again):

The advances that created what we’ve come to call tech – the development of digital computing, the invention of the internet, the formation of Silicon Valley itself – were the result of sustained and substantial government investment. Even the iPhone, that celebrated emblem of capitalist creativity, wouldn’t exist without buckets of government cash. Its core technologies, from the touch-screen display to GPS to Siri, all trace their roots to publicly funded research”

Getting to the longer-term disturbing part – the decline is in ‘pure’ scientific R&D

Yet, and this is the really disturbing part for me, the truth lies in the declining investments that we see being made in research and development. Both Government’s and the Private Sector has been constantly reducing the research funding for years. Recently in a PwC Strategy & report “2016 Global Innovation 1000 Study”  it was reported that there was a 19.5% decline in allocated funds to products but it is being redistributed it seems into software and the digital transformation journey as the focal point of new investments. The truth is we actually need both for a better transforming future.

Here in Europe, we have seen steady declines in R&D investment. They are at worrying levels as we lose those that are the brightest as they go where the R&D investment seems healthy and for that, we need to look East my friend.  In both the US and Europe we are seeing falls in funding research as a percentage measure of the GDP, it is steadily declining. Science funding is in real decline and that does not auger well for the future prosperity of our societies.

Well, why are we at this point? it is a combination effect in real innovation decline.

It is this combination of Short-termism that businesses have become caught up in. Also, how VC’s are looking for bigger and bigger returns and earlier payouts, pushing to see an exit strategy more towards 3, rather than in the past of 5 years or even more. This adds to the pressure to grow quickly, spending more of those funds to scale, delaying often furthermore groundbreaking breakthroughs that build on the initial insight until the IPO or acquisition by others takes place.

None of these factors are actually helping stimulate real innovation growth, they are relying on geographical expansion or product extension. New companies are also getting insanely overvalued and basic research continues to suffer from this redirecting of funds across the broader spectrum of funding.

Then you have companies like Apple sitting on an absolute mountain of cash, presently over a quarter of a trillion dollars and many commentators constantly asking where is their next big innovation going to come? They have the means but maybe not the innovation desire anymore, it will come externally by acquisition and not internally it seems?

Over 1.2 trillion dollars of overseas cash is sitting outside the USA held by just twenty companies of the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Berkshire Hathaway, Pfizer, GE, IBM, J&J, Cisco, Merck, Google, Exxon Mobile, P&G, and Citigroup. US companies hold more than $2.4 trillion in profits abroad for various reasons, all supposedly waiting for a tax law change to come back in. Will these be invested in innovation?

The writer of this Guardian article rightly stirs it up even further by asking about Wall Street extracting wealth by companies constantly busy in buybacks. They are paying out increasing dividends rather than invest in risk and their capacity to really grow, apart from picking up the acquisitions of all these insanely overpriced success stories, to keep being seen as “in the share price game” but also transforming, really? Can that change, will that change to wealth creating through innovation, job creation or new capital investments?

The West countries are certainly not growing their economies in new dynamic ways

We are struggling with really bad growth in most of the Western economies, we have seen a hollowing out of the middle class, we have seen real wages drop and wealth constantly heading ‘north’ to the ones already rich.

The writer finished his piece by asking “is capitalism eating itself alive?” I find that challenging, perhaps it is. The article is a disturbing piece for me because much of it is sadly true and that is the most uncomfortable part. We are not investing in real, breakthrough innovation, we are ‘burning’ our resources and money in ways that are leaving us increasingly devoid of a future where real sustaining growth lifts us all up, wealth is being unevenly distributed.

So are we committing just economic suicide or increasingly political suicide for those in power if we don’t change the dynamics of investment? Or is the entrepreneur that promising engine of our growth we all encourage, are they going to benefit broader groups of us all or just a selected few?

I am left wondering

I just sometimes wonder if we are all caught up in the success stories that are occurring but it is like the shop window we all stop and look into, we are simply gazing at what we ourselves are not able to achieve? Innovation can be so much different if we allow it to become part of all our lives. Yet it is not being allowed to become just that, part of our jobs, our way of thinking and evolving.

So, is innovation liberating us or keeping us caught up in a trap because we are investing our innovation dollar or euro in wrong ways or simply just hoarding them? It seems as science declines, technology gains but is the balance getting us all out of whack, delaying any promising future? Any thoughts?

Additional: My sparring partner on Innovation, Jeffrey Phillips, added this observation which I can only agree with: “The government does a lot of early ground breaking research but needs the private sector to turn it into usable products and services. Then other parts of the government create regulations and compliance issues that slow adoption of the new product”.

It seems commercialization is everybody’s problem.

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The post Are We Crushing Real Innovation? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The post Living in a globally connected world of Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

I wrote about “The present jobless innovation era we face” raising up the theory that Professor Christensen points towards, that we are working on the wrong types of innovation to create jobs.

We are measuring our businesses in financial metrics that were more designed for periods of scarce money supply and not what most of our companies have today, cash in abundance, sitting on their books and a world ‘awash’ of cheap money. Professor Christensen calls this theory of his “the Capitalists Dilemma.”

Risk-aversion is dominating our Western thinking
The present situation is that we are in a period of risk-aversion where the innovation ‘bets’ are more incremental, more short-term pushing for greater utilization of existing assets that are designated by Professor Christensen as “sustaining or efficiency” innovations. He believes we need more “empowering innovation” – those that create jobs and invest capital across longer-term horizons than today.
In Professor Christensen’s original article he had published in the New York Times in November 2012 he believe the solutions are complicated and he has looked to “seed the discussion”.

Firstly he rightly points out that the “challenge is not framed properly” as he suggests “even if there is robust growth there won’t be (necessary) job creation”.

He argues Governments can’t dictate. I believe there is continued risk of even more exit of the migratory capital to lower cost countries and projects where the conditions seem more attractive unless the ‘dynamics’ surrounding the need for innovation plus jobs can change significantly.

We certainly need “innovation + jobs” and not exported!

In my view and to a large view until we focus on all the factors that need to promote innovation plus jobs, our economies in the West will never recover that sustaining ability.

A place where capital is deeply invested again, so  it provides growth ‘within our borders’  that can, over time, allow us to return to prosperity.

We need these “sustaining and efficiency innovations” as they liberate capital but it is in providing the right conditions for this capital,plus all the idle cash today that is simply sitting on businesses’ books, to be moved towards this “empowering innovation” we need for job creation.

Professor Christensen ‘floats’ three places to start in making changes within our economic  systems to allow innovation activity to break free and become job creators.

Firstly, To change the types of metrics we use, to move these into more people orientated ones.

Secondly, to change the capital regimes that shift the thinking on investment incentives, where longer term productive investments held can make that horizon shift due to these tax incentives put into place for investing in longer term, bigger budget innovation.

Thirdly is changing the politics where consumption has dominated into different “empowering” decisions. I’ll come back to this another time. My feeling is, as these stand they are little too “apple pie” for me – sweet, initially satisfying but not enough.

Getting your jacket off

Let’s firstly go where the jackets have already come off with a far more substantial set of proposals to “win” this innovation race. Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), a Washington DC-based technology policy think tank along with Stephen Ezell have explored this innovation dilemma in their book “Innovation Economics- the race for global advantage” (released in September 2012) and offer a web site on this whole area www.globalinnovationrace.com

Within the book, the web site and ITIF they outline the arguments for significant innovation change and provide many sensible solutions to win the innovation race.

They have put these under the eight “Is” needed and cover each one in a chapter. These are under the following (organizing) headings:

1. Inspiration. Setting Ambitious Goals
2. Intention: Make innovation-based competitiveness a National Priority
3. Insight: Improving understanding of innovation performance
4. Incentives: Encouraging innovation, production and jobs IN the United States
5. Investment: More public funding for Innovation and Productivity
6. Institutional Innovation: Doing new things in new ways
7. Information Technology Transformation: broaden the IT transformation base
8. International Framework for Innovation: Everyone plays by the same rules.

Key digital platform technologies are places for real job creation also

They (ITIF) also suggest there are at least six key digital platform technologies today that need significant longer-term capital investment.

These are broadband- the critical enabler, next-generation wireless communications that speeds it all up, health IT for easier access to a comprehensive view of patients, intelligent transportation systems for real-time intelligence, a smart electric grid to ‘sense’ location of power, contactless mobile payments to use their cell (or mobile) to pay across society.

They quite rightly suggest without Government help to catalyse the deployment of these platforms progress will be slow.

Then we have “Innovation Economics” as a growing doctrine
The book and Wikipedia I would think have the same source but the Wikipedia source does provide a terrific outline of this growing doctrine that is suggested should reformulate conventional economics theory so that knowledge, technology, entrepreneurship and innovation become positioned at the centre of a model, and not independent forces trying to influence it.

This Wikipedia source goes through historical origins, offers the innovation doctrine as a more advanced theory, provides evidence and the geography associated with many successful innovation efforts, that are deliberate concerted efforts by combining markets, institution and policy-makers and use the geographical space. This then finishes up with worldwide examples and countless references.

Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity

In January 2012 a report came out from the U.S Department of Commerce in association with the National Economic Council entitled “U.S. Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity. This report may be a long read of 160 pages but lays out many ways of “Moving Forward” across a well laid out set of the parts that make up the innovation context

These steps suggested include 1) rising to the challenge, 2) the keys to innovation, competitiveness and jobs, 3) Federal support for research and development, 4)Educating our work force, 5) Infrastructure for the 21^st Century, 6) Revitalizing Manufacturing, 7) The Private Sector as the Engine of Innovation to offer a fairy comprehensive evaluation of the issues, challenges and investment opportunities to bring about a more “empowering innovation”.

Again within this report in their “Moving Forward” suggestion lies ten recommendations or factors that are suggested as ways for the United States (or even Europe) to regain a pre-eminent capacity within innovation.

It is a race each country engaged in innovation activity will want to win as this building of innovation capacity is the bedrock of economic growth and future prosperity. Otherwise, if we fail to grab this fully, we will face continued decline, short-term disruption and long-term stagnation.

Jobs can be created; our skills need adapting and refining

Of course everyone will continue to need a basic education or knowledge but they will need sharpening the skills and their motivation more. When we lack motivation, we lack that curiosity that becomes so important to innovation. The intrinsic parts of being curious, persistent and willing to take risks needs to be instilled far more into our education and thinking.

The call for education reform is gathering but we need to be careful in the rush to ‘reform’ we don’t “throw the baby out with the bath water” in our haste.

I was reading and storing away for future reference an article “What 100 experts think about the future of learning” that again places learning into its multiple parts: of using technology, sharing education openly and differently, where creativity and innovation fit to foster a new spirit, the internet and new media and its potential impact on teaching and learning, leadership, educational technology , the brain and psychology, technology education, different teaching methods and our institutions.

The list does provide a fairly comprehensive view for the impact of learning in the new ways we need to move towards.

Need a job? Invent It.

Thomas L Friedman offered a view in a New York article piece “Need a job? Invent it” suggesting these are dangerous times where high-wage, middle-skilled jobs – those sustaining our past economies – are in the past. These have become only high-wage, high-skilled to recalibrate this middle-class and their dependency.

The article further explores the view of Tony Wagner, a Harvard education specialist, that we need to send out every child as “innovation ready”, ready to add value to whatever they do. Wagner argues “the capacity to innovate – the ability to solve problems creatively, or bring new possibilities to life – needs these skills of critical thinking, communication and collaboration and are far more important to meet today’s challenges than academic knowledge”.

So who is doing this right out there in the world? “Finland is one of the most innovative economies in the world,” Wagner said, “and it is the only country where students leave high school ‘innovation-ready.’  They learn concepts and creativity more than facts, and have a choice of many electives.

Who is putting in place those stronger foundations within this innovation race?

I finish here on the competition and it is everywhere. Not just in a region of one country, or on one continent but across the world. The race is truly on, on who organises the relevant conditions to allow innovation to thrive, to offer the place where “empowering innovation” and where jobs are part of the equation.

There are examples in Europe- not just in Finland, Norway, Sweden but in Switzerland, parts of Germany, regions of Italy, Spain, France, Ireland and the UK. They benefit but equally suffer from centrally driven policies ‘handed down from Brussels at the EU level or constrained in “restrictive” thinking at National level.

Many of these “selected” places are simply “pockets of innovation” and lack this cohesiveness and coordination to really accelerate innovation into far more “empowering”to benefit society as a whole.

The BRICS of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are the emerging group are all developing or newly industrialised countries, distinguished by their large, fast-growing economies. These are the emerging new superpowers where they are experimenting but laying in the necessary building blocks to support and accelerate innovation.

They are sucking in the capital and provide the horsepower in people, both those that have gained from a focus in high skilled areas and those with basic education.

These combine in that drive to move up the social scale. Ambition is a highly motivating force and those within the BRICS have it. They are searching for advancing their global innovation advantage and know what it means to them personally and collectively.

Coming back to Professor Christensen he suggests the Chinese and Taiwanese in one interview. “Because they measured return on invested capital, every semiconductor company in the U.S. except Intel decided to outsource their microchip production.

All that production went to Taiwan. Morris Chang [who pioneered the $28 billion semiconductor foundry industry] now owns half the chip production in the world”. When Professor Christensen asked him why he wanted chips on his balance sheet, he said, “Because I measure profitability in cash, not ratios.” I don’t see why American companies can’t think that way.”

Technology Convergence – What’s your plan?

Lastly in our lightening round-up of emerging innovation power spots, one that we all really need to take seriously, South Korea. This came from Rohit Talwar, CEO of Fast Future under Technology Convergence – What’s your Plan?

I leave it in its entirety, as it states so clearly the organizing power of a country that is determined to win a larger part of the innovation race and is intent to achieve it:

“I have just returned from South Korea where I was delivering a keynote speech to a cross-industry forum on how to prepare for and benefit from the opportunities arising from industry convergence.

South Korea has made a major strategic commitment starting with government and running through the economy to be a leader in exploiting the potential opportunities arising from the convergence of industries made possible by advances in a range of disciplines.

These include information and communications technology, biological and genetic sciences, energy and environmental sciences, cognitive science, materials science and nanotechnology.  From environmental monitoring, smart cars, and intelligent grids through to adaptive bio-engineered materials and clothing-embedded wearable sensor device that monitor our health on a continuous basis – the potential is vast.

What struck me about the situation in Korea was how the opportunity is being viewed as a central component of the long-term future of Korea’s economy and how this is manifested in practice.

Alongside a national plan, a government sponsored association has been established to drive and facilitate cross-industry collaboration to achieve convergence. In addition to various government-led support initiatives, a range of conferences are being created to help every major sector of the economy understand, explore, act on and realise the potential arising out of convergence.

I am fortunate to have had the opportunity to visit 20-25 countries a year across all six continents and get to study and see a lot of what is happening to create tomorrow’s economy. Whilst my perspective is by no means complete, I am not aware of any country where such a systematic and rigorous approach is being taken to driving industry convergence.

Those who study Korea know that this approach is nothing new for them – long term research and strategic planning are acknowledged to have played a major role in the evolution of its knowledge economy and rise of Korea and its technology brands on the global stage. Coming from the UK, where it seems that long-term thinking and national policy are now long-lost relatives, I wonder why it is that so few countries are willing to consider – or capable of taking – such a strategic approach.”

To sum up our need for Innovation Job Chasing

Until we see a change that indicate a longer-term view of profitability and start measuring innovation differently we are stuck far more in the present jobless innovation era I outlined in my last article

Yes, we do have a “Capitalist Dilemma” but it runs deep in its fault lines and its many weaknesses nicely highlighted by Professor Christensen but for me, any current dilemma needs deeper evaluation today, not in 12 or 18 months’ time.  We need to look far more boldly at the Innovation Solutions and the economics and knowledge creation within this.

In all real honesty, it  is urgent and vital for each countries race for global advantage and future prosperity we become organized and see that “empowering innovation” and job-creation become more central in our thoughts and future decisions.

Can we really overcome the barriers to innovation we have, as each of our developed countries are so mired in old-style legacies? We need ones that can still take making profit into the equation but in different ways to ‘release’ capital funding that does bring jobs fair and square back into the innovation solution we actually need, to solve growing societal challenges? Ones that seek collaboration across all sectors of society, who recognize much needs real change.

These need long-term investments and all  the relevant parties working on solutions. At present far too many are playing the waiting game and that has to change.

It does seem many are also simply “re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” who will be overtaken by events and not providing real solutions of a current problem.

The post Innovation Job Chasing – A Race Needed To Win first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

This idea ‘hit the world’ when he wrote a piece in the New York Times last November, 2012. I gather this has been one of his best, if not his best read article ever.

As I’m sure you are aware Professor Christensen must be regarded as if not the top, then one of the top experts, on innovation. For me he sits at the top, so when he explores a theory, you stop to think about what he is trying to explain. It takes some of us mere mortal awhile to grasp and relate to these ideas and theories.

Theories into solutions sometimes is a long wait for wrong reasons

Firstly an aside, I need to get this off my chest. Although I suspect a book will eventually emerge, perhaps only next year 2014, far too often this is a little later than preferred or when really needed. The ‘currency’ or present day relevance often suffers from this parallel world of academics, moving on a much slower level.

They are still working within the publishing strictures and structures where a book has to be firstly written, reworked, proofed by editors, printed, bounded and distributed.

As you might guess here, I just wish some of these breaking theories that emerge from the academics could be sped up, they are seemingly just caught up in the dogma of rigour, validation and peer review. Weighed down in this legacy they often fail to provide the valuable insights that can alter the present day where the theory or dilemma has arisen.

That valuable thinking to address the very problem we need a solution too is today not having even further debate after a book comes out, sometime in the future. We need to begin to travel the road, not just survey it!
Actually it is rather ironic in one of Professor Christensen’s own theories, the disruption theory, that this is one of the real challenges within the publishing industry,  of being “disrupted,” as they fail to deliver in this faster world in the new alternative mediums many are looking for,  that he of all people chooses the old slower avenue of a printed book. Still he chooses to use this medium, such a shame when he expands on the very theories that explain much of what is presently going on today.

The world has sped up and I would urge Professor Christensen to get out of one of the very traps he has previously identified, and explains so well to others, for himself.  I would suggest his insights and suggested solutions are applicable to today’s problems and need exploring now. Can we afford to wait?

So what makes “the Capitalists Dilemma” so relevant today?
The basic concern today in most developed economies is the lack of real growth and the worrying concerns that each capital stimulus round seemingly does not offer that number of new jobs you would expect.  Old ones are being constantly being stripped away at a much faster rate. We are seemingly caught in a broad jobless economic recovery.

At the heart of this dilemma seems to lay the issues of the type of innovation being employed, the way we measure profitability, where this capital is being invested to offer increased returns and the lack of political and leadership will, or understanding, to change this.

Again when you read the article Professor Christensen talks of a doctrine of New Finance, taught over recent years by him and countless others in Academia, of failing to catch up with the new realities and teaching theories we need to operate in a changing world.

One of those is the need is to ‘account’ more in creating new jobs and people (gainfully) employed do not seem to be as much within any capital equation. Our new norm is certainly bringing increasing financial returns but without this job creation.

We seem to be faced with focusing on jobless innovation outcomes that are measured by magnifying each dollar invested by the classic ratios of RONA (return on net assets), ROCE (return on capital employed) and I.R.R (internal rate of return), used more when capital was scarce and costly so you husband resources.

Today capital is abundant and cheap – no, really!

Today capital is abundant and cheap, new skills are becoming scarcer, education is lagging the new knowledge economy need and we are applying these old rules of measuring outcomes in the wrong way in our changed world.

Professor Christensen argues that successful companies are making the right economic decisions within the wrong situation or economic needed times. Capital is not scarce, it is abundant, yet it seems we are investing in the wrong types of innovation. We still are measuring capital as though it was scarce when it is not.

Companies continue to drive assets off their books, they choose innovations that provide fast returns, they continue to outsource and they consistently keep the time horizons deliberately short for improving the rates of return and constantly higher dividends in focusing on the quick wins.

The politicians have not grasped the need to change the thinking to invest in longer term innovation that makes for more breakthrough and radical innovation activity.

Those that employ more people, kick starts new economic activity with fresh investment, new equipping to supply these new activities, and finally also attempt to reposition dividends in their longer-term value for the recipients.

Awash with money

In the Economist there was a recent article “A world of cheap money”  stating: “The message from the rich world’s central banks is clear: the era of ultra-loose monetary policy is here to stay.”

The Economist goes on to state: “Unfortunately, the effect on output has been more muted. America’s GDP is showing signs of accelerating. But Europe’s economies are flat or shrinking. Overall, rich-world growth is likely to be barely over 1% in 2013, little better than in 2012″

“Given the gap between financial froth and feeble growth, are central bankers doing the right thing? Supporters argue that cheap money is essential for economic recovery, particularly when (as in Europe and America) austerity-minded governments are tightening fiscal policy. Critics counter that low rates simply pump up asset bubbles, distort financial markets and risk inflation”

Clearly “monetary policy should not just operate in a vacuum” and it is Professor Christensen’s insight on where innovation is playing it part, or not in most cases, that can hold one of the real keys for rethinking how we measure success. Let me explain if you have not read his thoughts on this.

There are three types of innovation in his view where jobs occur or are lost.

These are summarized by Professor Christensen as:

Empowering innovations: these create jobs, because they require more and more people who can build, distribute, sell and service these products. Empowering investments also use capital — to expand capacity and to finance receivables and inventory. Empowering innovations are essential for growth because they create new consumption.

The second type is “sustaining” innovations: these replace old products with new models. They replace yesterday’s products with today’s products and create few jobs. They keep our economy vibrant — and, in dollars, they account for the most innovation. But they have a neutral effect on economic activity and on capital.

The third type is “efficiency” innovations: these reduce the cost of making and distributing existing products and services. Taken together in an industry, such innovations almost always offset the net number of new jobs, because they streamline processes.

But they also preserve many of the remaining jobs — because without those, entire companies and industries would disappear in competition against companies abroad that have innovated more efficiently.

Efficiency innovations also emancipates capital. Without them, much of an economy’s capital is held captive on balance sheets, with no way to redeploy it as fuel for new, empowering innovations until it is released.

His view here is: “as long as empowering innovations create more jobs than efficiency innovations eliminate, and as long as the capital that efficiency innovations liberate is invested back into empowering innovations, we keep recessions at bay” and suggests we are today not doing that.

The innovation machine is out of balance today

Today, our innovation activities are out of balance. I can strongly relate to this on where organizations are spending their innovation dollars: in short-term fixes, incremental thinking and efficiency relating projects, not on deepening innovation capacity.

We are presently encouraging our managers to measure profitability based on a return on net assets, or return on capital employed. That encourages companies to liberate their capital, so they invest in efficiency innovations, which means they can make even more money with fewer resources, so why would they invest in those more-longer term capital-intensive innovation projects under “empowering innovation?”

Professor Christensen offers this thought “what the economy ultimately needs are empowering innovations—like the Model T, the transistor radio. Empowering innovations require long-term investments, which tie up capital for years and years.

So companies are using capital to create more capital, and the world is awash in the result, more capital but the innovations we need to advance aren’t there”- this accumulating capital is remaining idle.

Today’s growth sustaining challenges are not framed properly

The need is to “unlock” the right type of innovation that creates a renewed, sustaining wealth for economic and industry revitalisation. There needs to be a shift from investing in efficiency innovation that tend to cut out jobs, where the focus is constantly on focusing on less capital in use and fewer people so that the extra release of capital is re-invested in more efficiency, not in disruptive or empowering innovation. The present day realities within business are how success is measures and if that is on RONA, ROCE and I.R.R then that is where the focus will remain.

Changing the existing paradigms takes time and convergence.

Empowering innovation takes time – anything from six to twenty years depending on many of the necessary long-term wealth creation factors required based on research and vision.

Two factors are well in place. We have capital, almost at zero borrowing rates, that the future net present value of any future stream of growth is identical to one that yields a return in weeks. We have a growing and compelling set of social needs to resolve many grand societal challenges that come more from empowering innovation.

Offsetting this we have a powerful set of factors to change if we see job creation as part of any economic recovery. We first have this current risk-aversion prevailing and we spend public capital on propping up ailing industries but do not pursue the alternatives with a grander vision and plan.

We are holding renovation back in some of these politically motivated decisions yet the young in most countries cannot find any jobs. We prop up banks with their bad loans yet the defaults by small and medium-sized enterprises will continue to rise.

In Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, and many parts of the UK, along with others all have growing at alarming rates, bad debts. So many smaller businesses are close to the ‘tipping point’ of going bust here in Europe.

A bolder innovative framing is necessary

We need bolder re-framing of our challenges, a clear recalibration of our measuring success and a set of cohesive strategies, policies and political judgements.

What will eventually bring this to the boil is the unrest, unemployed, stagnating economies, risks of growing debt and loss of property and capital achieved from the past unless those in policy decision don’t ‘face up’ and make bolder, imaginative steps.

Our markets need stimulating and this will either be from importing the type of goods that meet our declining economic needs as those are produced more efficiently elsewhere. Not a good prospect to face.

Lastly the very company that needs financing does not get the financing it needs. Capital is presently hoarded in the billions on pristine balance sheets of the biggest corporations; billions are inert and uninvested in private equity funds and sitting in countless private bank accounts offshore.

According to one report $1.8 trillion just sits in American listed firms alone.
The missing link is between cheap money and finding ways to achieve new corporate investments in the developed  economies that need this, otherwise there continues to be growing issues of dealing in the latest crisis or further kicking the can down the road in future pay off from continuous mounting debts and a lack of addressing bad loans and all the structural problems we are not facing today except in applying ‘selective’ austerity..

So why has this caught my attention?

Simply incremental innovation (sustaining, efficiency innovation) is getting us no-where fast. You see so many people within many of our organizations, big and small, working longer hours, feeling reduced identification with what they are doing and lacking that sustaining satisfaction.

There are millions out of work that could offer positive economic activity contribution.

We could have innovation that is exciting, that is empowering and this does come from working on challenging that are game changing concepts that we often suggest today as distinctive, disruptive, breakthrough, radical and certainly are empowering.

We are failing to translate today’s set of challenges because the metrics applied are inappropriate to our needs today and in the future. We are applying solutions often in their vacuum, they boost sufficiently in small ways but lack boldness, changing the dynamics and policies, the way we should be measuring and valuing success.

We reflect where we are in the West – far too timid, applying often just a real hard dose of harsh austerity, minimal structural reform that have a constraint on growth as we don’t people in their rightful place within the equation, they are being progressively written out of the capital model we seem to be locked into.

We apply “selective” innovation solutions to meet mostly short-term gains.

There are different solutions that need discussion

There are different innovative solutions, those I will attempt to outline in my next article, more to stimulate and trigger awareness of alternatives for today’s more jobless innovation outcomes.

In the meantime watch Professor Clayton Christensen’s talk at the World economic forum under “an insight, an idea with Clayton Christensen”.

Worth watching, believe me, and then you might be reflecting on why we do need to change that does bring that real, fresh growth from innovation that has people and jobs as part of the lasting equation, that fits more in today’s world, needing innovation to begin a stronger recovery than we have seen in a number of years.

The post The Present Jobless Innovation Era We Face first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.