Early this year, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a world-leading innovation think tank, released a ground breaking report entitled “Contributors and Detractors: Ranking Countries’ Impact on Global Innovation“.
The report ranks 56 countries for their contribution to the stock of global innovation as a function of paying attention to the “building blocks” of national innovation including investing in science, technology, engineering and math (so-called STEM subjects) education, tax incentives, IP protection and R&D investments as well as avoiding negative practices such as trade barriers, export subsidisation and the failure to protect IP.
The top five countries which contribute the most to global innovation as well as have the least harmful policies are:
- Finland
- Sweden
- United Kingdom
- Singapore
- Netherlands.
The United States ranked tenth and Australia at number 22. China is ranked 44 and India at 54.
It’s interesting to think about innovation in global terms; similar I suppose to the way we think about global trade, with its characteristic complex interdependencies and integrated production, supply and distribution chains and where national trade policies of one country or a bloc of countries can impact on the domestic trade environment of others.
Taking a more modest and micro view of innovation, however, and looking at innovation in organisations in particular, it’s perhaps useful to pause and consider how a similar focus on the “building blocks” of organisational innovation could benefit not just the organisation concerned, but the wider community as well.
Such building blocks include: building innovation capability amongst employees; strengthening capacity for innovation through incentives; providing permissions; freeing up internal authorising environments; and investing in the generation, dissemination and utilisation of knowledge across organisational boundaries. These measures help build the foundations for a strong culture of innovation.
Genuine innovation tends to be adaptive in nature — that is, innovative products and services catch on and jump fences quickly and in unexpected ways, so the products and benefits of innovation are only rarely fully retained at the source of the innovation. Think of how innovation at Apple, for example, spurred and energised multiple upstream and downstream industries, products and services. No one organisation can harvest or retain all the benefits of its innovation. The effects of good innovation spill over and benefit others too.
So beyond the organisational benefits of innovation, innovation by public sector organisations in particular, can therefore result in greater public good and increased public value. Positive innovation practices in public service agencies don’t just solve organisational problems, they increase the overall stock of innovation and benefit in the public domain as well.
Consequently, there is a public good to be gained when public sector organisations innovate.
Viewed in this way, innovation shouldn’t simply become another management fad, flavour of the month or a politicised priority. Instead, innovation should be seen as having public value with the potential to transform local communities and economies in surprising ways. Perhaps, like the way that trade has.
