immigration is more important than math?!

Now imagine this - that immigration has a greater impact on innovation than the teaching of math and science! Well this is a perspective taken by GigaOM and I have some sympathy with the view..because what it suggests is that people moving around the world freely taking their talent, hunger and abilities is hugely valuable to an economy. Perhaps a bit extreme as the writer of this blog only focuses on the needs of USA. So - it implies that Indians and Chinese teach the math and USA benefits from it!?

http://gigaom.com/2009/07/04/americas-secret-innovation-weapon-immigration/

To some extent the short term brain drain may well have to be tolerated (even if it seen as some kind of imperialism) so that in the longer term this tide of movement of the talent then starts to provide returns to the home country. There is evidence of this to some degree in teh shape of "brain circulation" - see for example teh Indian diaspora providing a huge stimulus to the INdian economy.

Why I like to think about such questions is that whenever I travel around mainland Europe I am struck by the almost complete lack of diversity in management, academia and naturally among policy makers. So few from other countries, other opnions and views, with the result that I see a Europe made up of a 1000 monocultures. The barriers have started to come up - for example the stupid attacks in Belfast by the Irish against the Romanians!! please forgive me for thinking that this was just a bit rich considering there are more Irish people outside Ireland! WHat if they were being beaten up?

So - the emergence of close minded protectionist barriers we see emergning around teh world is going to create a cramping of innovation, as entrepreneurs and especially entrpereneurially minded immigrants are prevented from free movement.

The USa wants to take a strategic view and ofcourse so will other coutnries. USA can probably do this because it is built on a history of immigation. For others - I think it will be really confusing by what they mean by strategic.

Time for liberals to apply themselves to this question..

comments here or via www.twitter.com/shaivyakarnam

Seattle and Starbucks and lessons in innovation

I am visiting Microsoft for an Innovation outreach summit - where about 11 of the world's largest companies are getting together - so a walk around PikePlace in downtown Seattle was going to be a sharp contrast to the next couple of days!

Here is an atmosphere of highly sophisticated (looking) retailers selling all manner of products which when you get them home you have to wonder - why you bought them. It is also home to the first ever Starbucks and so it is possible to envisage that from small acorns...and all that. It seems to be a matter of vision and intent as much as anything else. There is no rocket science to selling good coffee so to grow from a single shop to a global brand must simply be a matter of entrepreneurial imagination and folow through.

Now that they are as big as they - will they ever be able to do something like that again? Although I admire the company - I am not a great fan of the coffee!! Mainly because they seem to sell it in buckets rather than in cups or in quantities that one can manage - perhaps they learnt in old Dinosaur School of Waste.

Nearby there was coffee that was excellent in cup sizes you could manage and if you go anywhere else in the world you can get pretty much a "shot" and pay a price that is also pretty much a shot.

So here is the challenge - how do we keep pace with what customers want and need? Everything else as questions go seems to be noise!?

Why should big companies be interested in entrepreneurship?

The usual answer to this question and it is a fair one – is that unless big companies are interested in being innovative and sustaining the entrepreneurial spirit they will get wiped out. There may well be some truth in this – because mature organizations get into a kind of stasis with their product lines, management systems and complacent marketing. Big companies are sometime wiped out by new entrants and innovative competition. There are many examples to make this point – with low cost airlines, the entry of firms like Google and Youtube taking advertising away from conventional television etc.,

However we should look at a much wider set of political and social trends that are driving an urgent need to better understand entrepreneurship and what it means to big companies. Actually why should we worry about big companies? First – they have scale, employ large numbers of people and can get products to market. We need them!

And what are the signals for them to understand?

Since 1990 – with the fall of the Berlin Wall –there has been a domino effect in terms of reforms, in China and India and then more and more countries – all of which has lead to a dramatic shift in favour of free market econmics. The old world of two forms of economy – planned socialist systems and capitalism have collapsed into one system (as put forward by Prof Willie Brown of University of Cambridge).

This insight is pretty fundamental to us understanding the implications for entrepreneurship. We doubled the population in the free market system – almost overnight, leading to huge migrations of people, money, ideas, supply chains. In effect people and work have both moved in all directions.

We have to rethink the way that business is done, who we are dealing with and how to operate new business models. These changes have lead to insights about “the world being flat” or finding markets “at the bottom of the pyramid”.

Unless business leaders understand these changes and the implications for business they will not be able to make the right choices for innovation and growth.

Leaders are now also faced by high energy costs –this is no longer a CSR agenda for soft tree hugging hippies – fuel costs means it is a topic for the more serious minded business leader.

Navigating through these seismic shifts in our political, social and economic landscape (not to mention technology) requires – more than ever – for people in Oraganisations to think and act in “entrepreneurial ways”.

What are these ways?

In essence these are:

To be proactive, innovative and risk taking on the one hand (Covin and Slevin’s work) and to be able to put in place mechanisms for exploring and discovering opportunities – while being able to critically evaluate ideas (after all we do need to make money!) and then to have the skills and human capital the execute the plans that emerge from being creative and innovative.

These reflections are the result of working more recently with a number of major corporations at a variety of levels and it has even challenged the way that one would normally delver such education, insights and stimulation. Not least writing blogs, doing telephone lectures – (kind of podcasts), being highly interactive in workshops and working on the so called softer sides of human development – because the “hard stuff” is now so easily available from the internet!

Please explore further and come back to me if you want – see for example www.cfel.jbs.cam.ac.uk and www.transitions.co.uk