Friday, February 8, 2019

Innovation vs. innovation talk

Recently, I have been tired of hearing the talk about innovation. I am all for innovation, rather it is the talk that bothers me. Politicians, administrators, and business people always talk about innovation, but then they make policies which do exactly the opposite.

One of the keys to being innovation is science. Not only science in terms of technology developed, but also in applying the analytical skills necessary to innovate. However, at the same time that the talk about innovation has increased, science education has decreased. In some places, high school students do not have to take any science courses.

Not only science education, but is using the science in business/industry. When I used to teach engineering, half of my graduates were going into sales, because the companies would be using technology from other companies, often from other countries.

Some times those in authority sometimes push "innovation", but they push it in the wrong direction. For example, energy companies are not putting money in renewable energies but are putting money into being able to extract more oil, coal, etc. (Note the importance here is relative amount of money)

Being in higher education, I even see this trend in schools, especially in conservative (that is, traditional) ones. They mouth the words innovation, and even demand teachers do "innovative teaching", but their policies and practices actually discourage innovation.

What is also lacking are incentives, both inside organizations (companies, universities, etc.) and outside (mostly governmental). I have always found it amazing that organizations try to get employees to innovate and then try to claim that innovation as theirs. The company (and executives) make lots of money and the employees get nothing. What incentive is there for an employee to innovate?

As for outside organizations, innovation cannot continue to grow without patent and copyright reforms. The real problem here is that we are going backwards on this area, not forwards. Increasing use of digital rights management (DRM), secret trade deals, use of forced arbitration (bypassing the court system), extending publisher copyrights (but not the author), etc. has been the norm for the last twenty years or so.

One of the biggest problems when it comes to innovation is often the management. There seems to be an emphasis on everybody doing things the same way (for the reasons of ... blah, blah, blah, ...). But if everybody does things the same way how can there be any innovation?

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