PANEL: Innovation, Entrepreneurialism and National Competitiveness in a Global Age
Keynote Speaker:
Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen of Finland
Special Speaker:
H.E. Dr. Ivo Sanader, Former Prime Minister of Croatia
Master of Ceremonies:
Aart de Geus, Deputy Secretary General of the OECD
Panelists:
Juan-Felipe Muñoz, Managing Director, The Otun Group
Dr. Eric Bonabeau, Chief Executive Officer and Chief Scientific Officer, Icosystem Corporation
Stephen Shapiro, Founder and Advisor, 24/7 Innovation
Bruce Mau, Creative Director and Founder, Bruce Mau Design
Susan Polgar, Chess Grandmaster
Panel summary by Mary Kate Nevin, World Policy Journal
“Activity breeds innovation,” Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen of Finland told an eager panel. “New things are not created without taking risks.” And never has there seemed a more urgent need for new ideas than now, with the world’s economies still reverberating from the worst slump in generations and public debts expanding almost beyond control. The key to a sustainable recovery will be entrepreneurship and innovation, he said, and in Finland, “it is in times of crisis when governments have to be particularly active” in promoting them. Finland’s experience, he continued, shows that extraordinary difficulties can be overcome with the right policies and enterprise; so too for the rest of the world, “in the coming years governments will play a bigger role than before.”
Former Prime Minister of Croatia Ivo Sanader also shared his country’s experience, illustrating how it has achieved its progress while shifting from a heavily controlled to a vibrant “knowledge-based” economy. The key, he said, was major investments in human capital and fostering of “competitiveness in everyday life.” Education is one important component of this, but “this alone will not guarantee competitiveness;” it is essential to balance education with employment needs while giving special attention to rule of law and control of corruption. He concluded with a call to the European Union “to leave the doors of integration open” in order to ensure lasting peace and stability.
Shifting the regional focus, Juan-Felipe Muñoz spoke of the rigid social systems in Latin America. The long-standing impediments to interaction between the social worlds have hindered the development of new ideas, he said, and the key to innovation will be to allow people in the government and corporate realms to communicate more freely. He also emphasized the need to incentivize innovation and investment in developing, emerging economies, like those in Central and South America.
One important thing to keep in mind when considering innovation, Dr. Eric Bonabeau reminded the panel, are its different cultural conceptions. What innovation actually means can vary greatly from country to country, and he gave the example of gasoline to illustrate this point. In the United States, he explained, when people think of gas mileage, they assess the resources they have and try to figure out how far they can go. In France, however, the same concept is thought of as “mile gassage;” the French need to go from a point A to a point B, he said, and seek to do so in the cheapest way possible. These types of reflections of cultural priorities are important to remember as we think about how to meet the world’s needs with new ideas. As Stephen Shapiro reinforced, increasing the creative potential of individuals, businesses, and countries begins with figuring out what matters most and rallying around that challenge.
But the key to innovation, no matter what country one is in, is “thinking within the box.” Departing from the traditional idiom, Bonabeau embraced “the box” and its potential to enhance human creativity by forcing people to find strategic solutions within a certain set of constraints. Some of these constraints, explained Bruce Mau, are the concentration of possibility in developed countries, a lack of adequate communication in many places, fear of failure driven by methodologies that don’t sufficiently integrate risk, and ambiguities on what success actually entails.
Chess is one challenge that compels people to make strategic decisions, and Grand Chessmaster Susan Polgar emphasized the game’s potential to have a positive impact on society in general. Teaching children chess in school can help them develop creative, analytical, and problem-solving skills because it “largely is about decision making” within a constrained setting, she explained. It is “a very small investment,” she continued, “and I think it can bring a great reward” if integrated into the education system.
Aart de Geus concluded the session with a recapitulation of the global communities goals in the wake of the financial crisis, such as recalibrating the international development imbalance, caring for the environment, and departing from purely growth-based conceptions of development. Innovation will be the key to addressing these goals, and the panel presented a number of “exciting” ideas on ways to foster it. But although “innovation of all kinds of processes are important,” he said, it will be especially important going forward to “do some thinking on the innovation of our objectives, of our goals in society.”