Blog Discussion Two: Innovation and the Prosperity of Nations

At the recent Competitiveness Summit , the connections between business and innovation were made starkly clear

UK feels the pressure and challenge in creativity which is vital for the nation's future. How to improve the current status and exploit creative skills and designs among business and whole population becomes a serious subject in front of UK government.

As far as i'm concerned, there are a number of options which the government officials could put into consideration:

1. Different from commercialized businesses which always focus on short-term gains and losses, a long-term view should be taken during analysis and problem solving processes, government could also raise broad awareness among general public about the country's threat and foster a positive social enviornment to promote creativity and business innovation; for example, the designed national slogan could be 'start today for better tomorrow', 'have an idea? go and do it now!'etc.

2. Market differentiation: how to make a difference with other competing countries and regions for business innovation? Policy makers need to benchmark the other places like California, Chicago, Japan and even emerging economies like China and India which focus a lot on innovation as well, put in place a market positioning strategy and devise a series of policies like IP protection, incentive model, tax policy and government sponsorship program etc to movitiate business and designers to start more initiatives and establish a 'dance floor' for them.

3. Market Expansion: instead of purely focusing on business field, young graduate and even elderly popluation can't be neglected throughout this process, UK government could target at the broader popluation and encourage independent thought and inspire imagination through various governement-sponsored public programs and better policy environment. Ideas and imagination not only comes from technical research and design centers, but more from daily life.

Agree the above suggestions.
The current condition in UK is few persons controlling two skills both.
Always who knows innovation lacking of language of business school , on the contrary is the same.
It's hard for people to impact good idea into society. More and more people would like to imitate instead of originality.I think it's important for government to take some laws or regulations to encourage persons to creative and put penality to people who copy others or pass off others.
The copyright is protected better than UK , so UK government should stand US as good example.
Secondly , institutions such as college and university should retain indenpendence for thought.
As we know , now many colleges and universities have the sponsors behind and they need to follow sponcors' ideas. Due to above reasons , it's hard for institutions to keep the pace as usual. For example , the sponcor is a company , company's target is to gain more resource and make more profits. So company will consider more on how to earn money , not the design or creativity. Coz it's long time for design to produce the benefit , and company always make short time target and wish to earn the profit as soon as possible. This leads the imitate more and orginality to zero.
Thirdly , government should pay more attention to the social culture. The case said "We lack of symposiarch". I think government should be the symposiarch and lead the direction for the country.
Innovation and creativity is an abstract subject , it need foster within the good situation. If society doesn't put pression for person and person don't work all the time for survival , having more time for relax , innovation will be come into being slowly.

After reading through this article, there are some questions into my brain:
1. Why did UK pay such large attention to the innovation, even concerning the prosperity of Nation?
2. what is the block for UK to develop innovation?
2.How to do for the UK government to develop innovation? How to do for China?

In my opinion, the answers maybe are the following:
1. Why innovation?
Just like a company, nation should have its strategy to win the competition in the world. UK became the king of the world through Industrial Revolution. It was the best example evidence to show the relationship between innovation and prosperity, especially for UK. With the high-speed development of China, India and other developing countries, the developed countries have realized that their advantage in manufacture is disappearing, thus they should find something that their competitors cannot imitate. Everything concrete can be imitate, but abstractive ability is harder to be copied. That is innovation.

2. what block?
a. innovation flow(top to down, or down to top)
b. innovation system structure(innovation chain)

3. How to do?
(to be continued……)

As the problems thrown by Lihe, How to do ~~ make innovation? AND
just as Mr Rt. Hon Alistair Darling MP, UK Secretary of State for Trade and Industry said:
“We must seek competitive advantage by exploiting capabilities that our competitors cannot imitate” But,Buttt ~~ we all known, set a competitive advantage based on innovation has never been a piece of cake.~~

To Shorten the learning curve and find the shortcut to success, a good way is to be good at learning (or even imitate) success stories, digest best practice, and then involve your own improvement, finally to generate a unique innovation model for yourself.

Let's takes 3M to be the role model for innovation. it's a well-known companies rely on innovation to survive, I think we can learn from its best practice to improve our ability to innovate.
< About 3M >
It may be 104 years old, but the company deliver cutting-edge products like a brash new startup~~
< 3M's Seven Habits of Highly Innovation >
1. From the chief executive on down, the company must be committed to innovation.
2. The corporate culture must be actively maintained. "Hire good people and let them do their job in their own ways,and tolerate mistakes.
3. Innovation is impossible without a broad base of technology. For instance, 3M claims to have leading know-how in 42 diverse technologies. That allows researchers to take an idea from one realm and apply it to another.
4. Talk, talk, talk. Management at 3M has long encouraged networking -- formal and informal -- among its researchers. This is similar as article mentioned: “bringing ‘people in white coats’ into design spaces,” … around a strong programme, including informal activity.
5. Set individual expectations and reward employees for outstanding work.
6. Quantify efforts. 3M tells how much of its revenue comes from products introduced in the past four years to judge whether its R&D money is being spent wisely. That way management can assess which lab is hitting its mark and which may be falling short.
7. Research must be tied to the customer. Employees spend a lot of time with customers to understand what their needs are so they can go back to the labs to come up with valuable products. This point is vitally. same idea mentioned in the article by Bill Sermon, Vice President, Design at Nokia Multimedia, who said “We are a people-led business,” he said, and their needs drive creativity and innovation.

From a certain meaning that innovation itself is unique, can’t be copied or imitated. But what we can do is to learn from those successful best practices, fostering a suitable soil ease for innovation, then innovation will born from here with high probability.

Innovation and creativity is critial nowadays for all companys, and it is same for a nation, consisting of thousands of companys and orgainizations. But, not like for a company, developing innovation for a nation is more complicated. Specifically, every nation do have its own history, culture background, and nature/social environment, and also different economic development stage, this is why it cannot copy innovation strategy from others. So, it is more like a system, national leaders need to consider things from overall point of view, which means when they are promote innovation in some area, need to consider various impact to other areas simultaneously. This what mean " compliated". I guess the key point of the article is to say UK is keen to innovations, but the fact is it is quite behind other exceptional performance countries, and the key reason is, although UK's leaders are claiming they are pursing innovation, but they are indeed " conservative " in deep mind. And, again, the reason under this is "complicated" --not easy. For China, we are fast changing developing countries, so it is not strange someway for changes always happens, for developed country, like UK, once to be most powerful countries, it is difficult to change things at all.

After reading the article, we can easily know that Innovation is vital to the Prosperity of Nations.However, there are some problems for the nation's innovation come out in the UK. the problems have raised highly concern because innovation and the UK ’s long-term economic success are closely interconnected with each other.

followed are some of the problems:
1.how to deeply exploit the nation’s creative skills.
2.the UK cannot ba able to take full advantage of its innovation. the UK is lacking of the talent who both have the ability to innovate and understand bussiness.
3.there are not enough‘joined-up’ design representation in the UK.
4.what the companies can do to use design effectively.

in order to stimulate and maintain the economic prosperity, there are manys things should be done. here are my sugesstions:
1.the government should supply a platform for the exchange and meeting of ideas, innovation, and different disciplines.
2.to promote design and creativity through government procurement.
3.seeking competitive advantage that cannot be imitated by the emerging economies.
4.collaborated design with other disciplines, training people with the understanging of the demand of business.
5.interaction design, service design and research methods should be paid more attention.
6.Designers need to keep independence, and should be protected from being tarnished by association.

in conclusion, the Prosperity of Nations cannot be realised without innovation, so the UK government must have the real ambition or leadership to help combining innovation and business more closely and effectively.

what is environment to cultivate creativity? I think some items would be necessary:

- Fact-based society value

-Democratics

-Free acadamic atmosphere

-Integrity level

-Ideal talents

-Leadership mindset

-Encourage non-traditional thinking style

What items can be in place? not only for UD, but also for China, before talking about creativity.

Leng Shijie 2010960064 (10GA)

Yes, admittedly, all over the world, the fact is the countries with more innovative ideas are those more advanced countries.

China is now encouraging more and more innovative ideas from kids. The whole education system need to be changed to stimulate the innovation and creativity from kids. this is the most important situation China now faced.

business model innovation ramp up in China in the past few years. Merging, new indursty chain are pulular word.

Social responsibility innovation is needed in China now.

Innovation is power. USA is famous for its innovation power,the famous discriptive innovation

companies such as Apple, 3M，P&G are all from the USA. But we China,are lack of innovation

ability, companies are driven for the sales numbers, they attach little importance to R&D, and the

city Yiwu, Dongguan are famous for its copycat ability.This is unhealthy for our further development.

Better innovation, better life, hope both the goverment and the companies can raise the innovation

sense.

After read through the article, it seems the author is somewhat disapointed about the Summit.
Though the common awareness of the importance of innovation is necessary, it won't help if there is no substantial solution. The author put the hope on the government policy. it is all right, but not enough.
Talking about China, we are losing our low cost advantages now, though we may not realise it.
Some global manufactors have started to move from China to some even lower cost countries.
We have to prepare our next generation more competitive on innovation and creativity. In my opinion, the education reform, the industry restructure, the government support shall be the focus.