Clinton Global panel: Approaches Toward Innovation

Elliott’s Note:  This post on innovation may be a bit lengthy, academic, dry and off-topic for CNReviews.  Apologies in advance.  Please feel free to move right along to the next post!

How can we cultivate our society’s capability to innovate in order to solve social issues? This year’s Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) convened government, business, and NGO leaders to explore ways to accelerate progress in CGI’s key focus areas: clean energy and climate change, education, health, and poverty alleviation.  Innovation was framed as one of the key enabling factors for how social ventures could be successful.

I watched a panel on “Approaches to Innovation” discussed various concepts of entrepreneurship.  The panelists were:

• William Drayton, Founder and CEO, Ashoka
• Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, S.W. Ascherman Professor of Strategy and Organization, School of Engineering, Stanford University
• Reena Jana, @rjmac,  Editor, Innovation Department, BusinessWeek
• John Kao, Chairman of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation

Summary

Each panelist had a different perspective on innovation.  Bill shared his perspective that innovation must be cultivated among youth, who must be provided with opportunities to succeed as a “changemaker” at a young age in order to cultivate the right skills and mindset to become an effective social entrepreneur down the road.  Kathleen introduced the concept of “recombination” and “collaboration” as key factors for entrepreneurial success, and John highlighted the trend of “bottom-up” innovation where products designed for India or China are being adaptived for the United States and Germany, not following the traditional “trickle-down” pattern of innovation.  The implications to me are as follows: (a) always see the opportunity to employ younger people, but only those who have the seed of a “changemaker” mindset, (b) consider rotating roles to bring fresh perspective to things, (c) look for innovation in unlikely places, like the copycat-nation of China.

Still interested?  Read on…

1.  “Everyone a Changemaker” – Bill Drayton, Ashoka

Ashoka’s starting premise is that society’s problems must be solved by “social entrepreneurs,” who pursue an innovation or idea with incredible tenacity to solve these problems.  However, in today’s world, only 1% of people have the necessary skills and self-perception to be a social entrepreneur, or “changemaker.”  Furthermore, adults who lack these skills and self-perception are impossible to change.

Ashoka believes that the biggest leverage point is increasing the % of “changemakers” in our society.  To accomplish this, we must provide experiences to youth that enable them to succeed in “changemaking” in their formative years.

Three key skills are needed for “changemaking”:

• applied empathy – entrepreneurs need empathy in order to build teams and coalitions to support their cause.
• teamwork
• leadership

Unfortunately 98% of children fail to get the experiences needed to consider themselves a “changemaker.”  One key insight for me is that, for social change, “youth are a huge, and in fact usually the only significant available human resource” (from Drayton’s “Changemakers” article), and that youth are or can be competent.  Drayton also highlighted Silicon Valley as a supportive ecosystem for innovation and an example of an “island” of innovation.

Related links:
Ashoka
Ashoka on Twitter
“Everyone’s a Changemaker” by Bill Drayton, founder Ashoka

2.  “Recombination and Collaboration” – Kathy Eisenhardt

Kathy Eisenhardt is Professor of Strategy and Organization at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) with Tom Byers.  From her experience in Silicon Valley, she focuses on two key ideas.

First, ecosystems that support innovation are good at the recombination of individuals, ideas, and objects.  She gives the examples of how people and teams that previously worked at Internet ventures are now being “recycled” to work on young cleantech companies.

Second, collaboration is important.  One aspect of collaboration might be rotating leadership, so that different perspectives can be brought to bear on a problem. Reena Jana blogged at Business Week about the panel she led:

Eisenhardt also suggested rotating executives to work on various projects rather than keep them in place, to keep thinking fresh. “Bringing new people to a project can lead to them seeing what’s wrong immediately and identify what can be fixed,” she advised, “That can be difficult for people who have been on a project for a long time.”

3.  “Bottom-Up innovation” – John Kao

John Kao is founder of an NGO called Institute of Large Scale Innovation (ILSI).  ILSI researches the topic of “innovation stewardship” in places like Silicon Valley and Helsinki and try to figure out how supportive dynamics can be replicated to tackle new fields and in new geographic areas.

John talked of “Bottom-Up Innovation” where innovation can come from unexpected places, like middle-income or developing countries.  The traditional view of innovation is described by Reena Jana in another Business Week article:

Over the years, multinationals have prospered by turning out premium-priced products for the world’s affluent. Rather than also designing products for poorer people elsewhere, many businesses found they could simply pass yesteryear’s models down, as if they were unloading fleets of used cars….
…”The dominant logic holds that innovation comes from the U.S., goes to Europe and Japan, then gravitates to poor countries,” says C.K. Prahalad, a strategy professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits. “But now we’re starting to see a reversal of that flow.”

This new trend of “Bottom-Up innovation” (or “Innovation at the Bottom of the Pyramid” in C.K. Prahalad-speak) creates opportunities to take ideas and learnings from developing countries and apply them to Western, advanced markets.

If this trend is true, then we should expect to find many ideas we can copy from China to apply to the US. A great example of “bottom-up innovation” is the virtual goods business model in gaming, which went from countries like Korea and China to more developed countries like the U.S.

Interested in more approaches to Innovation as applied toward social enterprise?  follow Philip Auerswald on Twitter.  He is co-editor of MIT Press’ Innovations Journal and associate professor at George Mason University.  He tweeted some interesting stuff during the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting.  Here are some more attendees of CGI who have written in Innovations Journal:

• Fazle Abed (http://tinyurl.com/l3k577)
• Peter Blom (http://bit.ly/bzCBX)
• Paul Polak (http://bit.ly/14e0iu)
• Mary Robinson (http://tinyurl.com/klojqh)
• Paul Farmer (http://bit.ly/14e0iu)
• Stuart Hart (http://bit.ly/edPlG)
• Doug Solomon (http://tinyurl.com/l77rhg)
• Soraya Salti (http://tinyurl.com/mfpore)
• Jacqueline Novogratz (http://bit.ly/aLnWl)
• Bill Drayton (http://tinyurl.com/mepovb)
• Tom Kalil (http://bit.ly/1aXuUS)
• Larry Summers http://tinyurl.com/mkbyy8