Principled Innovation LLC

Understanding the stakes

December 17th, 2006

At the heart of my continuing effort to provoke association leaders into embracing innovation is a deeper and more compelling motivation with implications far beyond the boundaries of our community: associations must do their part to help sustain America’s capacity for innovation in the 21st Century. I regard every contribution we make to this effort as important not only to the specific interests of all associations trying to remain relevant, but also vital to our national interest in confronting the growing challenge of intensifying global competition.

As many of our community’s most important leaders are fond of pointing out, associations touch virtually all sectors and segments of our national economy, and more than a few exert considerable influence on our national political discourse. Still others are actively exploring and investing in the growth potential of the global marketplace. Given the crucial role our enterprises play in society, I believe associations must operate as committed and passionate advocates for the necessity of innovation as a national capability, so our leaders can help our elected officials and other policymakers think creatively about the best ways to build that capability in the years ahead.

This is a huge opportunity for our community, but if we are to fully embrace it, we must understand the stakes of the challenge before us. In his column in last Wednesday’s The New York Times (registration required), The World is Flat author Thomas Friedman mentions the strategy of Chinese educators to transform China into an “innovation country” by the year 2020. Friedman describes what he sees as the basic shortcoming of China’s approach:

No question, China has been able to command an impressive effort to end illiteracy, greatly increasing its number of high school grads and new universities. But I still believe it is very hard to produce a culture of innovation in a country that censors Google–which for me is a proxy for curtailing people’s ability to imagine and try anything they want. You can command K-12 education. But you can’t command innovation. Rigor and competence, without freedom, will take China only so far. China will have to find a way to loosen up, without losing control, if it wants to be a truly innovative nation.

But Friedman does not limit his call for change simply to China. The United States, he argues, also must change if we are going to sustain our standard of living, much less our position of global leadership, in the 21st Century. He writes:

In a globally integrated economy, our workers will get paid a premium only if they or their firms offer a unique innovative product or service, which demands a skilled and creative labor force to conceive, design, market and manufacture — and a labor force that is constantly able to keep learning. We can’t go on lagging other major economies in every math/science/reading test and every ranking of Internet penetration and think we’re going to field a work force able to command premium wages. Freedom, without rigor and competence, will take us only so far.

In my work, I consistently advocate for striking the careful balance of freedom and discipline in the pursuit of innovation in associations. Tom Friedman argues that freedom and discipline are equally essential to the pursuit of innovation on a national scale as well. The stakes of our embrace of innovation, then, are far greater than whether our organizations will discover their next trajectories of success going forward. In a global economy in which the effective execution of individual and collective creativity is the indispensable competence for long-term growth, the consequences of ignoring innovation are profound for both the association community and our country. The choice for association leaders is clear, and I hope all of us will have the courage to accept responsibility for acting on it.

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