Research & Ideas
Promoting Innovation is more than tilting at windmills
Written by Gavin Chait
What would you expect to see if you walked into a roomful of successful innovators?
Would you expect them to dress the same? Have the same haircuts, or the same educational background or ethnic or cultural origins? Would they speak the same language, share the same jokes or be driven by the same goals?
Innovation, almost by definition, is about the new and the different. The likelihood of any two innovators sharing any characteristics in common is remote. Some of them will certainly have been to all the best schools and had all the best doors opened to them. Some will have been lucky first-time when they were still young enough to be living at home. Some will be honest. Some will be criminals. And some will have kept their integrity, and achieved success, only through their own persistence and unyielding determination to succeed through every disadvantage.
What they will not have is any common factor that, if copied, will permit the mass-production of innovators.
Every person has the capacity for innovation, just as every child – when presented with crayons and paper – is capable of sitting down and drawing away happily and creatively. Not every child will have the same talent for drawing, but that is immaterial next to the ability to make the attempt and enjoy the process.
The only children who will not draw will be those who have experienced some trauma or have been punished until they believe that creative expression is somehow wrong.
If a group of people produces little innovation then the chances are that the process of innovating is being constrained. Jails don’t have to have bars to prevent movement. Excessive legislation, bureaucracy or the deliberate stifling of difference and dissent will all create encumbrances.
Malawi is one of the poorest countries in the world. Despite having access to a large freshwater lake, the country suffers from drought, pathetic agricultural yields and perpetual economic mismanagement.
William Kamkwamba overcame the educational disadvantage of being a Malawian by studying in his local library. He happened to read Using Energy, a book produced as an educational guide for children. Stimulated, he built a wind-power generator using blue gum branches, bicycle parts, and materials collected in a local scrap yard.
The dynamo generator was first built by Hippolyte Pixii in 1832. Pixii was building on the discoveries of Michael Faraday, a Brit, and Anyos Jedlik, a Hungarian. It says a great deal about the simplification of these complex physical and engineering discoveries that, 170 years later, a 14-year-old Malawian school-boy could follow the instructions and produce electricity.
If Kamkwamba had been living in a more developed country he would have been recognised as a budding geek and packed off to university to study engineering. Instead Kamkwamba was discovered by the international development community looking for good news stories. He has spoken at conferences, and now studies “leadership” in Johannesburg. There is no word as to whether he will actually ever study engineering.
Kamkwamba should be sufficient to humiliate the Malawian government into figuring out what they’re doing wrong that keeps their people poor. Instead Kamkwamba is being studied as if he contains a general element for innovation that can be extracted and applied to development in Africa.
The real miracle is not that innovation happens, but that it doesn’t happen more frequently. You have to physically restrain crayon-holding children from drawing on things. You also need to encapsulate adults in layers of smothering red-tape and punishment to stop them innovating.
The search for innovation lies in the way in which people are treated when they have new ideas, not in the people themselves. You can’t shut a person in an Iron Maiden and then play their favourite music to encourage them to dance.
The search for ways to promote innovation is the search for obstacles. Find them and remove them.
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