Product Description

Not long ago, Americans could rightfully feel confident in our preeminence in the world economy. The United States set the pace as the world's leading innovator: from the personal computer to the internet, from Wall Street to Hollywood, from the decoding of the genome to the emergence of Web 2.0, we led the way and the future was ours. So how is it, bestselling author and leading expert on innovation John Kao asks, that today Finland is the world's most competitive economy? That U.S. students rank twenty-fourth in the world in math literacy and twenty-sixth in problem-solving ability? That in 2005 and 2006 combined, in a reverse brain drain, 30,000 highly trained professionals left the United States to return to their native India?

Even as the United States has lost standing in the world community because of the war in Iraq, Kao warns, the country is losing its edge in economic leadership as well. The future of our prosperity, and of our national security, is at serious risk. But it doesn't have to be this way. Based on his in-depth experience advising many of the world's leading companies and studying cutting-edge innovation "best practices" in the most dynamic hot spots of innovation both in the United States and around the world, Kao argues that the United States still has the capability not only to regain our competitive edge, but to take a bold step out ahead of the global community and secure a leadership role in the twenty-first century. We must, though, take serious and concerted action fast.

First offering a stunning, troubling portrait of just how serious is the erosion in recent years of U.S. competitiveness in innovation, Kao then takes readers on a fascinating tour of the leading innovation centers, such as those in Singapore, Denmark, and Finland, which are trumping us in their more focused and creative approaches to fueling innovation. He then lays out a groundbreaking plan for a national innovation strategy that would empower the United States to actually innovate the process of innovation: to marshal our vast resources of talent and infrastructure in the particular ways that his studies of innovation have shown lead to transformative results.

Innovation Nation is vital reading for all those Americans who are troubled by the great challenges the United States faces in the ever-more-competitive economy of our twenty-first-century world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34416 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Alarmed by the lack of innovation in the United States today, former Harvard Business School professor and current consultant Kao diagnoses the situation, describes best practices, explains how innovation works and puts forth a strategy proposal, all in an attempt to squirt ice water in America's ear. Kao-who has been an entrepreneur, a psychiatrist, an educator and a pianist for Frank Zappa-is clearly passionate about his premise. Aimed primarily at policy makers and legislators, his three-pronged agenda is designed to help the government create a culture committed to constantly reinventing the nature of its innovation capabilities. However, his authoritative and history-rich book is not necessarily useful to the everyday reader, as Kao includes few small-scale strategies. His one effort to bring this down to the citizen's level-in fictional short stories about the future-is a little contrived, jamming in statistics and leaning on flashbacks. But overall, the book does its job. The question is, will lawmakers look at it and follow its lead? (Oct. 2)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Tom Friedman sounded the alarm and gave us the big picture about the flattening of the world, and the decline of education and innovation in the U.S.A. John Kao gives us the specifics on exactly why and how the U.S.A. is losing our most valuable asset -- the ability of Americans to come up with great ideas, from light bulbs to PCs. Most importantly, Kao points in the direction the U.S.A. ought to go if it is not to become a global also-ran."

-- Howard Rheingold, author of Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution

"The arms race of the last century has been replaced by a new global brain race -- and the U.S. is in danger of unilaterally disarming. This inspiring book frames the challenge facing us and offers immensely practical advice on how to regain our place as innovation leaders."

-- Paul Saffo, Roy Amara Fellow at the Institute for the Future

"John Kao hits the nail squarely on the head. In an engaging and highly readable way he delivers a timely message with important implications for our future -- that the global race for innovation is on, the field is filled with highly focused competitors, and our biggest mistake would be complacency."

-- Sean Randolph, President & CEO, Bay Area Economic Forum

"A nation's capacity for innovation will determine whether it will be rich and powerful or poor and weak. In his insightful exploration of the world of innovation, John Kao makes clear the challenge that America faces as its own capacity for innovation erodes even as the rest of the world's abilities are growing. America's postition of power and wealth will be determined by whether it can rise to meet the challenge of the innovation agenda that Kao lucidly sets out."

-- Peter Schwartz, Chairman, Global Business Network

"It should be a surprise to no one that John Kao's new book is a highly innovative approach to innovation. He analyzes with crystalline clarity the challenges to U.S. innovation hegemony from ambitious and hungry competitors, China, India, Finland, and even Estonia. He does not shrink from advocating specific solutions, including the creation in the United States of 20 $1B Innovation Hubs and a National Innovation Advisor. His vision is not, however, American. He shows us how the whole planet needs to accelerate its capacity for innovation. For those of us who lead institutes dedicated to innovation this is a Bible and a Koran."

-- Reg Kelly, Chairman, Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium, and Director, Institute of Quantitative Biomedical Research

"An insightful, and scary, account of the innovation challenges faced by the U.S... A very useful book that punctures America's complacency about innovation."

--Business Week

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

ONE

BRINGING INNOVATION TO INNOVATION

Do something. Do something to that, and then do something to that. Pretty soon you've got something. -- Jasper Johns, painter

Not long ago, while prepping to deliver a speech at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California, I decided to eat the company's cooking and Google the word "innovation." Though I expected to see a lot of hits, I had no idea just how popular the word would be in the Googly universe of "all the world's information at your fi ngertips." Wham, the search came back -- 330 million references to innovation.

Those of you who, like me, constantly scan the new arrivals in the business section at your local bookseller may be aware of a similar phenomenon. Innovation -- or at least the notion of innovation -- is hot. The titles tell the story: Open Innovation, The Art of Innovation, Fast Innovation, Customer- Driven Innovation, The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, Dynamics of Innovation, Seeds of Innovation, and so on. New titles appear nearly every month in an endless proliferation of arguments, a debate about innovation that is itself symptomatic of our core problem with innovation.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that the biggest obstacle to developing a national innovation agenda is not how many Ph.Ds or how much venture capital or how much wireless capacity we have. Rather, it's our level of knowledge about innovation that counts. And the ways we currently define it do not, for the most part, fit new global realities. Neither comprehensive nor specific enough, the plethora of defi nitions actually masks an underlying lack of consensus. In short, we know everything and nothing about innovation.

I know firsthand that there is confusion about innovation because I constantly receive calls from people -- some quite nervous at first -- who identify themselves as some version of a new "innovation process owner," meaning they are in charge, somehow, of innovation in their organization. My first question is typically, "What do you mean by innovation?" The variety of responses I've received over the years would fill a very long list, but it would be as short in internal consistency as it is abundant in quantity.

Neither is experience a guarantee of expertise. When I teach senior executives about innovation, I sometimes use a slide showing a number of management terms scattered across a page. Innovation is among them, as are strategy, creativity, transformation, and leadership. I ask the executives to define innovation and describe how the various concepts relate to one another. Their responses are typically as scattered as the words projected on the screen. Is strategy part of innovation or innovation part of strategy? How far in the future should innovation initiatives be targeted? Is innovation about being creative or is creativity about being innovative?

I believe we are in what might be called a pre- Copernican period with regard to innovation. It's as if we don't yet know which heavenly bodies revolve around which others. We don't even know where all the planets are located, nor do we have a viable theory of planetary motion. We rely on metaphors and images to express an as yet imprecise and unsystematic understanding.

Little wonder that one of the fi rst tasks I set in my teaching days was to ask my students to defi ne innovation, prompting more than a few of them to mutter under their breaths about "semantic hell." No matter. The importance of being as clear as possible about the journey on which you are embarking, whether as an inventor in your garage or a scientist in a federally funded lab, can scarcely be overstated. Your understanding shapes, in turn, how you measure innovation and what you decide to do about it. If innovation is equated with intellectual capital, you'll count patents; if it's an educated workforce, you'll count Ph.D.s; if it's infrastructure, you'll count broadband networks and bits per second; if it's culture, you'll count pieces of public art and symphony orchestras.

Many of us assume that the tools and methods of innovation are mature, simply waiting to be deployed. The truth is otherwise; we have few if any mature standards for how to practice innovation and measure the effectiveness of our efforts, let alone for how to train people to become master practitioners.

In contrast, consider the mature discipline of accounting. The need for audits became necessary as organizations became more complex, and a management technology was developed in response. If you wanted to know where a company's money came from and where it was deployed, you could find the answers by going to the accounting department, talking with the chief financial officer, lookingat online financial data, consulting Generally Accepted AccountingPrinciples (GAAP), and scanning annual reports and 10Ks. Butwhen it comes to innovation, most organizations lack anything like acomparable level of tangibility or management method.

What is more, there is an aura around innovation that clouds our perspective and often introduces an emotional component to the rational. Hmm, over in this corner is the sexy, expeditionary, wealth-generating, cool stuff, while over here is the structured, bureaucratic, legacy stuff. Which of these is more moi? We can safely assume that nobody wants to be known as un-innovative. But if innovation is seen as just another management mantra, another synonym for "good," then the cause is lost. The truth of the matter is that innovation is hard work, and it has passed through many incarnations and many attempts to explain it over the years.

Probably, the most widely shared misconception about innovation is that it's all about science and high tech. The rise of microlending, one of the most powerful innovations in recent years, shatters that notion.

Economist Muhammad Yunus came up with the idea of microcredit in 1974, after giving a woman in the village of Jobra, Bangladesh, $27 from his own pocket to help her make bamboo furniture. Previously, women in a village like Jobra either had no access to capital or they had to pay usurious rates to local loan sharks. Realizing that poor women were actually excellent credit risks and that giving them small loans could transform an entire local economy, Yunus formed Grameen Bank in 1976 to institutionalize what he called microcredit. The bank has now loaned more than $6 billion to more than 7 million borrowers, and Yunus took home a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 in recognition of his innovative efforts.

Microlending is not the only social innovation of recent years. We can also cite the advent of impartial consumer testing of products, carpool lanes on busy highways, carbon-offset schemes, and a thousand other examples.

Nontechnological innovations abound in business as well. The classic example is Herb Kelleher and what he's accomplished at Southwest Airlines. Built on the simple idea of short-hop flights, no-frills service, and a clear, low-cost fare structure, Southwest has achieved phenomenal success and changed U.S. air travel in the process. Or how about John Bogle, who invented the index fund for individual investors and built the Vanguard Group of investment companies? Dov Charney proved with American Apparel that clothing could be manufactured in the United States by workers enjoying good wages and benefits. And what about W Hotels? Who would have thought a hotel chain could be hip?

These examples are not intended to discount the vital role of science and technology. Indeed, breakthrough technologies regularly set the stage for staggering waves of innovation. We're in the early stages of one of these transformations now that has been enabled by Internet-related technology. It is also easy to agree with analysts who reckon this century will see explosions of innovation, thanks especially to the revolutions in life sciences, nanotechnology, and clean technology. And there is an increasing amount of discussion on the innovation potential of our fast-evolving understanding of the brain and consciousness.

The point is not that technology isn't crucial -- it is -- but that we must think more broadly. My own defi nition of innovation is both integrative and aspirational. I defi ne it as the ability of individuals, companies, and entire nations to continuously create their desired future. Innovation depends on harvesting knowledge from a range of disciplines besides science and technology, among them design, social science, and the arts. And it is exemplifi ed by more than just products; services, experiences, and processes can be innovative as well. The work of entrepreneurs, scientists, and software geeks alike contributes to innovation. It is also about the middlemen who know how to realize value from ideas. Innovation flows from shifts in mind-set that can generate new business models, recognize new opportunities, and weave innovations throughout the fabric of society. It is about new ways of doing and seeing things as much as it is about the breakthrough idea.

Seen in this way, innovation is always in a state of evolution, with the nature of its practice evolving along with our ideas about the desired future. That is why innovation has meant different things at different periods in our nation's history, a state of flux that has made it difficult to fashion a consensus around any one meaning of innovation itself.

Version 1.0 of our national innovation capability, for instance, featured individual visionary inventors. Central casting gave us Benjamin Franklin and his kite, what we might call the artisanal model of innovation.

Geniuses in their workshops and garages, men like Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, later came up with inventions that inspired large-scale enterprises, ushering in version 2.0 -- the industrial model of innovation. Business requirements gave rise to mammoth, centralized corporate research groups that reached their zenith in such venerable institutions as Bell Labs, HP Labs, and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC).

In the days before C...

Customer Reviews

Restoring a Culture of Innovation
John Kao has sounded the alarm over America's atrophying ability to innovate. Through apt historical references and a no-nonsense critique of fundamentals (e.g., school curriculum, institutional cultures, etc.) he shows where America has strayed from the "engine of invention" following Sputnik and through the Apollo missions to the moon -- and how today's innovation hotbeds in Singapore, Denmark and Finland are eroding America's long-term economic viability. He also offers practical solutions (from the micro to the macro) in this provocative "long view" of a culture that was built on innovation.

Nothing Innovative About this Book
For a book about Innovation, there is nothing Innovative about this book. The stories about Singapore, Finland and Ireland are well known and can be found in Business Week or Wall Street Journal. Yes, and well read readers will know that we are losing our innovation edge to China and India. No new information there. And, his answers are not new - use the internet, improve our education systems, entice outside talent, better offices, etc. In fact, I would even question his definition of innovation - jazz is innovative but classical music is not? He starts with the assertion that innovation is not just about technology and science and then labors onto technology and science. Further, at the end of this book, he used the "I" word so many times to emphasize his opinion, that I lost count of it. I can go on about this book, but let me leave it with this - this is the worst book on innovation that I have read. A lot of borrowing from others, a lot hype on what he will provide for solutions and then NO delivery. Don't waste your time on this book.

a call for science, creativity, and growth
John's first-hand experience meeting business, science, and political leaders around the world shows how widespread and intense the drive for innovation has become. Americans should read this book not in fear of emerging nations' ascendancy, but in eager anticipation of the prosperity that these new collaborators will bring. If fear is warranted, it's that our own leaders will not share the foresight and commitment to innovation that is becoming the global norm.