Innovation for growth

Dec 07, 2009 Editorial

In the most fundamental sense, there are only two ways of increasing the output of an economy. One can increase the number of inputs that go into the productive process, or if you are clever, you can think of new ways in which you can get more output from the same number of inputs.
For the longest while – until the middle of the last century, as a matter of fact – most focused on the first method. Then a number of economists crunched actual data from the USA over the past 200 years and discovered a surprising finding: 85 per cent of growth had actually been generated from technological innovations that increased output from constant inputs!
One would have thought that with the discovery of that silver bullet, policy makers the world over – and especially those in the underdeveloped world – would have jumped aboard the innovation train in their quest for sustained growth. Some did – the far Eastern Tigers, for instance – and their record speaks for itself. But sadly, the record of fostering innovation to boost growth rates in the rest of the third world – including Guyana – has been spotty at best, and their growth trajectory has been correspondingly limp.
While the image that immediately springs to mind when the term “technological innovation” is mentioned is new complicated machinery to accomplish a previously manually accomplished task – that is not the whole story.
Technology is simply a “technique” – a way of doing something. Innovation is actually the successful implementation of any new creative idea. While creativity refers to thinking of a new product, service or a process, innovation refers to successfully carrying that idea to the marketplace.
For instance, books have been published and sold for hundreds of years. Then with the onset of the internet, and the rising frustrations of the reading public to access the widest range of titles in their local bookstores, someone – Jeff Besos, in this case – had the bright idea (the “creativity”) to offer books for sale over the internet.
The innovation was to establish Amazon – now the largest purveyor of books in the world that has branched into a variety of other products to rack up annual sales of over US$20 billion.
He spawned a whole new way of getting goods – they could have been produced the same old way – more efficiently into the hands of a vastly expanded market. That’s innovation.
What has worked in the past is working in the present: innovation is decisive to the success of businesses and the economy at both the micro and macro levels. The gateway to innovation is the capacity to conceive of new ways to satisfy the needs of society – to creatively imagine a different future.
This calls for thinking outside the box. We know that lots of people have bright ideas, but lack the quality beyond the gateway – the willingness to take risks to transform the idea into reality. Successful innovators are prepared to fail.
In Guyana, our greatest failure in our thrust for development has been our inability to inculcate and sustain a culture of innovation. While there may be bursts of individual creativity and innovation, a nationwide culture of innovation must be nurtured – especially in a world of economic relations where only the fittest will survive.
While the responsibility lies with the private sector, the government, and the labour movement, the entire society must be infused with the new ethos. And this means our education system – from the nursery to the university – has to get with the programme.
No matter what the rhetoric that is being spouted about educational reform, our delivery of the curriculum still boils down to rote learning – the very antithesis of the creative process.
Our new Chancellor of UG has mouthed the appropriate words on the need to reform that institution. The economic success of the US was built on the innovations emanating from the dozens of Agricultural Colleges founded on their land grant programmes. Can he at least get UG to work with NARI to increase their innovativeness?

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