Blog discusion 2--Innovation and the prosperity of Nations

Having discussed and debated on Innovation for almost a week and here again one more article of Innovation and the Prosperity of Nations, one big question mark jumped in my mind__ Is Innovation the only element/factor for a nation or company's prosperity?

My anwser now after reading the above mentioned article is "No".
The reasons are :

1) What should nation or company do to help creat innovation. As it is said, there are two ways to motivate innovation, one is extrinsic way and the other is intrinsic way. Therefore, a good preparation and enough support for innovation is as important as innovation itself.

2) How to make the existing innovation more profitable? The final intention for innnovation is to be get the innovation applied product commercialized and make profit. So it is also a vital topic focusing on the application of innovation.

Therefore, Innovation is not the whole story as Professor Myerson said:" Design is not the whole story"

"How to make the existing innovation more profitable?..." is good question.

To an extent, innovation commercialization is more critical to a success of a company.

as regards with a nation?

I wanna sort innovation at national level as roughly following categories:

-Business innovation
-Technology innovation
-Social innovation

There 3 things may basically be the myths of a nation's a prosperity.

Lengshijie 2010960064 -GA

“Innovation and the Prosperity of Nations” is a review on the speeches and ideas in the Competitiveness Summit ’06 in London. It is argued that although there is a clear connection between innovation and the advancement of a business as well as a nation, more corporates in Britain become losing agility and are willing to watch the competition and make use of the existed creative skills.

While the invisible hand becomes stagnant to promote creativity, it is the visible hand, governments, that play the role. As is stated in the essay, because of the ambition of a government to lead from the front, there will be more substantial investment, more centralized resources on technology and innovation and more network guaranteed among centres of creativity.

Government should take an more active part in the allocation of innovation resources and the promotion of business creativity in the framework of market economy.

(Student Number: 2010960117
2010GA Sarah Lu)

1、Why does UK pay such attention to the innovation strategy?
2、How to develop innovation strategy?
There are issues I found after reading this article.

Why？I agree with the point of GA_Wang Na_2010960208 that there are two kind of energy to generate innovation: extrinsic way and intrinsic way.

For the extrinsic way, as we know, in recent history if china, the feodal regime was destroyed by west countries. The industry revolution let west countries more innovative, and more powerful. China had to get the way to chase the west countries. The extrinsic pressure let China know that we can not enjoy the post prosperity forever, there is strong competition in the international world. Maybe UK know this better.

For the intrinsic way, every nation in prosperity wants to keep its advance forever, thus it should develop the nation strategy to keep this advantage. There are many nation strategies in recent competition of world, for example, energy strategy, environmental protection strategy, and so on, but not every nation has enough energy resource, and not every strategy can let the nation win the absolute leadership in the world, but innovation strategy could! This strategy can not be copied, and is compatible with other strategy.

How?
In my opinion, there are two aspects that UK should take into account.

The first one is the process of innovation development.
Innovation derived from inspiration, and it is more effective from initiative. From this aspect, the UK government should think about the way to develop innovation. Just as nurse a baby, we can give baby food to make baby live, and then educate it to know about the world, and then give it enough space of thinking and the chance to change the world. UK has the best resource of education in the world, thus maybe the nation should be more open to the new idea, and should give innovation more space to live.

The second one is the structure of innovation development.
If we make innovation as a baby, we pay more attention to how to develop the baby to innovative young man in the above-mentioned advice. As we know, every body has friend, thus we should find some friend for this boy. The innovation needs inspiration and the collision of different culture. For this reason, UK could make the best environment of collision of different innovation. In this way, the innovation can be more! Innovation is never a single idea, but a cradle of thinking, a university of these innovative children.

It is surprised for me to know that one of the most developed countries, UK, has problems with creativity. During the Competitiveness Summit in London, attendees mentioned several times about the threat from China. On the one hand, I feel happy because they are thinking China as a creative competitor (true or not). On the other hand, I come to realize how important innovation is for the prosperity of one country. Even the “creative” UK starts to think they are not creative enough.



Once upon a time, Cambridge and Oxford reverberated like thunder and they were well renowned for their creativity all over the world. Today, the Competitiveness Summit in UK was described to “be a pedestrian, feel-good and networking event”. Frankly speaking, same things happen in China. It is true that China government attached much attention to innovation. Innovation is almost the topic to be mentioned on every meeting. Officials or professors delivered the speech full of “creativity” or “innovation”. Everyone feel good. But, question is there is any meeting really contributing to the innovation?



Interestingly, many innovation park popped up in recent years, especially attached to some universities in China. It looks like that university must always be creative and one company located in the innovation park must be innovative. Is it the fact? Perhaps not. Universities introduced many companies into the park just for getting the financial support from government for “innovation” and following the fashion. They do not care whether the company really deserves to be there.



I agree with Nico that “one of the way of invigorating or re-orienting an economy is for governments to be ambitious, invest substantially, and leat from the front”. China government has realized the importance of innovation and been investing substantially on innovation. However, when we organize some conferences on innovation, we’d better make sure we are really going to debate with clear motivation. And, before we decide to pour the money into one project, we need to give it another thought whether we are pursuing something really creative.



We learned from this that China needs to run fast. We need to remember that the Red Queen said “in this place it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place”.

I agree with the point Wang Na discussed above. Without doubt, innovation can lead the prosperity, but it could never work alone. Whether the innovation itself can be commercialized, whether the commercialized innovation can get a high market share, whether the innovation can sustain its competitiveness, and how the government can support innovation are all very important factors that will work with innovation itself to determine the prosperity of a country. Among them, I want to talk more about the government support.

To encourage creativity and innovation, standing on a theoretical level will never be enough. Government need to be more proactive, both in policy introduction and strategy application. Like Prof. Ali said in class only using a slogan to encourage people in Singapore to be more creative will not work. From my point of view, there are at least three aspects government can consider.

1. Attractive and aggressive innovation-oriented policy, like tax waiver or higher government investment.
2. Education renovation. Make learn to create and innovate a core ability every student could command.
3. Government reorganization. Appoint those who have the creative minds to charge the function needs the most creativity.

Wenqi Li-GA-2010960090

JiangZeming,the former chinese chairman once said ”Innovation is the soul of nation’s development”. There is no question that innovation is important to individual and company, and it is even more essential to a nation. In my opinion, there are three factors promoting to nation’s creativity.

Firstly, government is supposed to play a major role in the nation’s creativity. A good government policy, such as an innovation encouraging scoring system, can generate a huge number of fresh thoughts.

Secondly, a joint education can help students think differently. The ideas from various subject can implement one’s thoughts. For example, Einstein is not only the master of physics, but also a good violin player.

Finally, more emphasis should be paid on design. The big success of Apple brings a design oriented notion to public. It’s widely accepted today that design innovation is highly linked with market share. So, the design factor should never be neglected.

the Summit should have the eye to find the talent who had a great idea for the social progress ,and make the dreams come ture. Not just with a utilitarian goal, find the way to make themselves top to the society.

No.:2010961484

Everyone talks about innovation, but hot to be innovative? Just think over a new idea? Or setting down and having a meeting to discuss? No! It`s far from enough. Innovation needs realization.
There are a lot of measurements for the government to take. The tasks of the government is not merely shouting slogans, but showing how to make good ideas come true and then helping individuals and companies to do that. The government should make favourable policies such as low tax rates and reward program to stimulate the action of innovation.
Moreover, universities are also an important role in innovation. New technologies and inventions are not coming from companies but from universities. Companies are just investors, what they concern is whether profitable or not. Therefore the government should pay greater attention to universities and the educational policies.

(student number: 2010962402)

For the moment, I am thinking that innovation is a crucial need but we have systemic problems holding innovation back.
While we know that many innovations are accidents, I'm not sure if they are necessarily random. The Internet, for example, came out of a sustained R&D effort over a long period of time.
Various pieces of the puzzle fell into place giving us a great discontinuity--an innovation of the scale unknown in decades--upon which markets, industries, jobs and the development strategies.
The challenges of a country, especially for small countries with limited resources led to innovation from necessity and determination. This suggests the special circumstances of country might require an approach to economic development that is qualitatively different from the traditional model.

I feel this is like an Egg and Chicken question:
Does creativity make a Nation prosperous?---Or does a prosperous Nation provide a good environment for the creativity?

Innovation is important both to a company and to a nation, as it can form some distinguished feature that can’t be copied by others. The government not only needs to support innovative ideas and help these ideas to commercialize, but also need to help build an innovative circumstance for the whole society. For a nation to be creative, it is not enough to change the adults’ way of thinking, but also to change that of children. Thus it is important to change the education system, which has been preventing children from thinking creatively.

Innovation clearly has a positive impact on prosperity of Nations as we can see from the article, Eisenhower’s ARPA (renamed to DARPA) and NASA initiatives which were at the root of the Internet and communications satellites, both contribute signification portion to the foundation of the US superpower.

But such government initiated innovation programs only represent part of the efforts for innovation. Other innovations, in area such as arts, business, design and etc, are more likely to be seen and developed by individuals and private sectors. Research programs at universities, R&D centers within enterprises are just as important as government investment/funding.

To have the best allocation of resources to encourage innovations, government should focus on strategic industries such as defense, economics, but also to establish a good system to encourage the innovation coming from the private sector, such as stock market for financial incentives to encourage efforts as well as investment for innovations.

Echo, thanks for coming up with this discussion of "innovation". For me, it is much more meaning to talk about this than the cases that all of us have stayed up all night long for

After several sessions of CBI, I have gotta say, I am so impressed by what Professor Ali brought to this course. Not only the course regarding creativity and business innovation, but the random topics like WHO AM I , WHY WE ARE HERE, BEING SUCCESSFUL IS A BAD SIGNAL,,,,,, really made me think a lot. And I am pretty sure, you guys felt the same way I did.

But when we look into the innovation and its relativity to the prosperity of a nation. we have
to admit that innovation is by all means the driving force to push the world forward. UK lost its
NO.1 world economy to US after the WW1 because of the numerous technological innovations and industrial inventions were born in America. and Japan surpassed US during 1970s and 1980s, due mainly to its cutting-edge technology. However, the thriving of information technology brought US back to the throne again. The prosperity of a nation for a certain period of time is always with the innovations in terms of technology.

Right now, when we, Chinese people, are dazzled or proud of how fast our economy is growing,
or we are sort of chill other country's enthusiasm under the global financial crisis, feel that we are becoming the kind of country like USA. Seriously, we are not, and we are not even close to them.

Maybe I am not knowledgeable enough to talk about how we can do things to help our country to be more competitive when it comes to innovations. But as we can learn from USA, the whole educational system and technology-oriented industrilization, and most importantly, chasing the American Dream, the national ethos of the United States of America, in which freedom includes a promise of prosperity and success.

Innovation, is and will always be the thing that matters in the complex world.

To achieve prosperity, enterprises should fashion new business models and seek new methods of development. In this age of globalization, innovations in business models are essential to start a business. A good business model can put innovations into better use. In this new age, creations and innovations come from communication and interactions among different people. The nation should offer such a platform for them to transform ideas into actions, and also create opportunities for emerging enterprises and entrepreneurs.

I appreciate your great discussion here, we should no longer be satisfied with imitating. Instead, we need to convert cost advantages to more sustainable competitive advantages-often through innovation. Prosperity is based on productivity, which is rooted in innovation. Often, innovation is measured by input indicators, such as research and development, which reflect the willingness to invest but do not guarantee the ability to excel.

In modern society, all of us like innovation. But for the innovation, i think there are different ways.

After reading the article,I found how to develop innovation strategy is really hard.

I agree with Wang Na that there are two kind of energy to generate innovation: extrinsic way and

intrinsic way.For the extrinsic way, I think both the goverment and the company must invest more

money and attention to the innovation activities. For the the intrinsic way, I think people in the

whole nation must cultivate a sense that innovation is the first priority.