Innovation, again and again

Twice in one week, innovation in the news. In the Christian Science Monitor (free link at Truthout.org), How Companies can Encourage Innovation:

In varied ways, the subject is gaining recognition as an important element in helping businesses succeed by improving the bottom line and keeping employees satisfied. Economists and futurists regard creativity and innovation as cornerstones of competitiveness in the United States.

“We’re moving from an industrial economy to a creative economy,” says Richard Florida, author of “The Rise of the Creative Class,” although he notes that the transformation is still in its infancy. The creative sector, which he says is made up of “people who think for a living,” includes such fields as science, technology, arts, culture, design, law, healthcare, and education. These creative people, he adds, “provide a critical stimulus for economic growth.”

At the same time, in the Economist this week is a 20 page Special Report on Innovation. There isn’t much strikingly new in either piece (and both, in my humble opinion, could benefit from talking more about the educational side of the issue, as I try to do in How Computer Games Help Children Learn!). But I was particularly struck by one graph in the Economist special report–a graph of productivity growth, showing the dramatic role that innovation plays in overall growth:

As the article points out:

[T]he OECD‘s experts believe that most innovation has been caused by globalisation and new technologies.

Analysis done by the McKinsey Global Institute shows that competition and innovation (not information technology alone) led to the extraordinary productivity gains seen in the 1990s. ‘Those innovations’”in technology as well as products and business processes’”boosted productivity. As productivity rose, competition intensified, bringing fresh waves of innovation,’ the institute explains.

That is why innovation matters. With manufacturing now barely a fifth of economic activity in rich countries, the ‘knowledge economy’ is becoming more important. Indeed, rich countries may not be able to compete with rivals offering low-cost products and services if they do not learn to innovate better and faster.

Innovation is in the news. Now we need to look seriously at how the dramatic technological transformation of the last quarter century are producing a growing economic shift that is fundamentally changing what education means in the digital age.