Beyond investment is innovation . . .

‘Thinking outside the box’ doesn’t make it so? Beyond the gaping hole or shortfall in investments, we need to recognize the challenge of innovation? The 21^st century is about competitiveness and thus the prerequisites of investment and innovation. Contemporary thinkers are studying successful global enterprises who are investing tons of money to learn how to think creatively. While they have a track record in innovation they still see themselves as being behind the curve – redefining and raising the bar for the rest of us!

It helps if we ourselves recognize that we have work to do? And since the church is a large measure of our culture, its hierarchical structure and lack of transparency have become part of who we are: at home and at work we’re expected to live up to the mores of hierarchy? Yet Catholics with unquestioned faith seriously play the role of the faithful by engaging the church. For instance, there are Catholic theologians who have criticized Encyclicals; moral theologians who have counseled responsible parenthood and religious who have spread ecumenism. If the predicate makes us uncomfortable, then we’re moving away from the imperatives of innovation? The challenge to Filipinos is innovation, not exports per se! Our ‘export-dependent’ neighbors are more innovative, playing in an altogether different league – if we are misreading it?

Being an archipelago in the middle of nowhere makes being parochial natural? In Europe and in the region, borders are man-made and people easily connect by crossing them. During the Cold War, obviously, people from Soviet satellites were not allowed to venture beyond their borders, under pain of death. And so in the case of Bulgaria, they called the area between them and Greece ‘no-man’s land’. Today though their wine-making heritage and creativity have taken hold; exploiting its soil and weather, they transformed the locale into a vineyard and are producing a fine dry red merlot-cabernet blend, very limited series, named No Man’s Land – and it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Innovative thinking is counterintuitive and demands lateral thinking. But thinking outside the box starts with a mindset that goes against a parochial bias? It goes beyond cross-disciplinary, collaborative thinking. It presupposes that the mindset is not restricted; and why the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Maryland, at The Johns Hopkins University, is geared to encourage curiosity by aspiring scientists. The GPS, says science author Steven Johnson, owes its eventual development to two young doctoral students who intriguingly tracked the Sputnik’s 1957 flight. They then reversed the mathematical model to track nuclear submarines before the era of the GPS.

China, the NY Times reports, has crafted an innovation strategy, sees innovation as the future, not cheap labor and generic products, and is perhaps aware of the Japanese’ shortcomings in ‘software writing’. And Bill Gates wants the US to remain a country of immigrants to build on Silicon Valley. If we, Filipinos, think local and believe we’re innately creative, if we think of solutions and markets as local, most likely we wouldn’t be prolific innovators? And if at the back of our minds we believe consumerism is evil, we wouldn’t generate product ideas to drive and raise our revenues as a nation, and overcome poverty?

‘Starting with the end in view’ is one way to get our creative juices flowing. For example, Steve Jobs visualizes ‘simple and easy’ as fundamental features of Apple products. Another is to visualize the end in view as a worst-case scenario. What is that scenario like? If we assume bare-bones benefits and low-price for a product we want to create, the worst-case scenario for the product could be that it won’t sell or if it does it would not generate the volume and margins to make it sustainable. And exhausting the elements of this worst case scenario would be a good exercise in exploiting lateral thinking. And then the next step would be: (a) to flip the worst case into the best case, and (b) describe the elements of this best case. To brainstorm the best case as a first step may, in and of itself, impose a barrier, but thinking the opposite allows the mind to be more expansive since there is nothing at stake. Of course, the exercise ought to start with such fundamentals as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the product-architecture – the value chain, from the basic product benefits all the way to its lifestyle or ego benefits. (The human ego could be channeled to the greater good like the world-class teaching hospitals in New York and elsewhere bearing the names of philanthropists that funded them.)

News item: ‘BOI fails to implement new auto program’. And now we want to think outside the box in order to see the light at the end of the tunnel?