Why is innovation NOT a US priority?
By Designdialogues, on September 8th, 2008 Thomas Friedman’s Sunday NY Times article, which informed readers have already seen, raises this question. Why does the US continue to ignore innovation, particularly of the scientific kind, as a national priority? Why do the political conversations in the US continue to fall back on backwater cultural issues and divisive policy? Why does the war economy seem to be the most reliable financed of the innovation engines that Federal US taxes support?
While we still have enormous innovative energy bubbling up from the American people, it is not being supported and nurtured as needed in today’s supercompetitive world. Right now, we feel like a country in a very slow decline — in infrastructure, basic research and education — just slow enough to lull us into thinking that we have all the time and money to play around in Tbilisi, Georgia, more than Atlanta, Georgia.
How important is this issue?
A developed country’s competitiveness now comes primarily from its capacity to innovate — the ability to create the new products and services that people want, adds Curtis Carlson, chief executive of SRI International, a Silicon Valley research company. As such, “innovation is now the only path to growth, prosperity, environmental sustainability and national security for America. But it is also an incredibly competitive world. Many information industries require that products be improved by 100 percent every 12 to 36 months, just for the company to stay in business.”
What can we do about it in an election year? Go back to the original question – let’s find out why it is NOT a priority.
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Re-visions by Peter Jones Design Dialogues invites you to examine ideas, new and old. Everything humanity creates is work-in-progress, and so is open to dialogue. Re-visions and re-views are welcome. Design Dialogues is for working out ideas, before they find their way into practice or in actual publications.
Innovators all face an urgent challenge to make the differences that must happen; there is no longer any status quo. Many of our trusted institutions & social contracts are now broken. Whether from fear or habit, our culture is not yet innovating democratically. We do not really know how to collaborate sufficiently to the task.
From healthcare to finance, politics to education, infrastructures & decision processes, we can & must reinvent our own futures. These social systems have evolved beyond their capacity to transform by management. Collaboration is insufficient - We truly need new ways of working, deciding, and organizing.
Of the many ways to collaborative intelligence, some demonstrably better than others. Dialogic design, based on systems thinking & design science, offers a validated way to create new understandings, design systemically, & act democratically on the deep drivers of a problem.
A community of practice meets for these dialogues in person every 2nd Wednesday in Toronto:
Art, science, and design are three ways of knowing, and in the field of action they inform each other. All modes must be recruited if we are to interfere & reinvent social systems. Your participation is required.
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