The 1ππ0\/@Ŧ10π Crisis

Innovation is a word that is used today in every imaginable way possible (no pun intended). It’s been a while since our world spent all of its resources and manpower on building up its militaries, engaging in war, and trying to suppress its colonies and own citizens. Yes, for the last several decades our brains have had a chance to focus on other areas such as entertainment, business, science, and technology. But as we have all too hastily discovered, innovation is fast running dry.

In no ration?

Let’s look today at the various fields that humans have taken a strong interest in.

Entertainment: Every passing year, you can see an increased number of film fans complaining about the lack of creativity. New sequels of old classics, adaptations of comic books, recycling of the same movie concepts (Ben Stiller as the innocent awkward geek put into funny situation, the same old romantic comedy which you can guess how it will end before the opening credits roll out, and a host of other formulas that people have seen time and again). While some of these end up being pretty decent such as Die Hard 4 and Sin City, you can’t help but notice that movie studios are fast running out of ideas.  

Business: If you have looked at any job postings recently, you will be hard pressed to find a position NOT requiring its candidate to be innovative. Not that I think these companies know what they exactly mean, but innovation is the hot word of the 21th century and they want a piece of that pie (several studies have indicated that 45-75% of all economic growth is directly attributed to innovation). From what I have witnessed in my short time in the business world is that companies aren’t so open to innovation as they think themselves to be. Change in any organization means costs and lots of costs ranging from; restructuring of organizations to new training methods to infrastructural costs to bring the change into place. Unless its broke, they wont fix it. So instead of huge changes such as the eradication of classical working hours, we have little TQM tools here and there that superficially gives corporations a feeling that they are in fact innovative.

Science: Still no cure for cancer, AIDS or most other serious illnesses. We did land on the moon some several decades ago but progress has been practically non-existent if you consider the grander scale of the universe. Einstein still stands as the most important scientific figure of all time, and perhaps one of the only know figures to the average public. Aside from the slow progress, grants and support for the scientific community is not nearly enough to expect any spectacular results in the near future.

Technology: Boy, will the people that have been stuck in a comma for the past several decades be disappointed when they wake up. If science-fiction movies are anything to go by, humans have long been expecting flying cars, time travel, and colonization of other planets.  Instead, the best thing we got right now is a phone with some extra features and TVs that can display 1080 lines of pixels instead of 480. Hardly groundbreaking stuff.

As we can see, almost all areas of interest to human beings are turning into saturated markets that no longer seem to be able to generate new ideas and products. This is in fact why innovation has become such an important word in the 21st century, constant innovation has become a requirement for entities wishing to stay ‘ahead of the curve’ – whether its a company, individual, or nation state. So what does the future look like then in this world where innovation is becoming not only more demanded, but also harder to supply. Is the situation really so bad?

–

Innovation Restriction 

First of all, I should state that I truly believe that innovation is limitless and infinite, therefore any scarcity of this so in-demand ‘resource’ is our fault and our fault only. I’ve heard it mentioned that creativity and innovation is not something you can teach, you are either born with it or not. I completely disagree to this analysis, and I believe that it is these types of predispositions that lead to our lack of innovation. However, the biggest clog towards innovation in our world is the infrastructure and the long ago built systems in place that secretly govern us. In past times this could have been governments and their autocratic leaders, but today it is increasingly becoming greedy corporations that prevent us from evolving at a faster and more socially desired way than naturally possible. Yes, those companies that seem to be leading the movement towards innovation are the exacts one restricting it – kind of like a Trojan horse full of carpenter ants .

-Energy: Oil is a scarce, over-relied on, and non eco-friendly chemical that is slowly leading to the destruction of our world. Solar-power, electricity, wind-power, and heaps of other innovations are there ready to be applied on to our polluted world. These are technologies that are in place and even becoming more economic solutions, but it will be some time before major oil companies, and their ‘friends’ in the government will let this happen.

-Software: While every praise should be given out to Bill Gates and Microsoft for their innovations that have deeply impacted this earth, they should in the same manner be criticized for unfairly ridding themselves of competition and keeping their technologies so much under wraps. You can’t really blame Bill, as his endeavours have led him to become one of the richest man on the earth, but it all becomes quite meaningless when you consider that he will be giving out 95% of his wealth to ‘help the world’. If he and other technological companies of those times embraced the idea of Open Source earlier, ‘the world’ might be a much better place already. Hopefully entities such as Google, Linux, Wikipedia can prove to be exemplary models that show sharing knowledge can benefit us all and ultimately lead to progress.

-Medicine:  It is a sad truth that it is profits that rule this world and not advancements that help humanity. How else do you explain companies not willing to help create this cheap cure for cancer? The foremost and easiest reaction is to think of these pharmaceutical companies as evil and conscious-less. However as true as that might be, there is naturally a thicker layer to this tragedy. 1)Providing research grants to this cause will lead them to lose money. 2)Losing large amounts of money with no matching revenues will lead to unacceptable financial results. 3) The company will lose money and employees will be cut to steer clear of bankruptcy. 4) Shareholders and the board will fire whoever was responsible for the mess and even more staff will be lost. So it is capitalism that should be blamed, if anything.

-Entertainment: Demand and supply are concepts that apply to the entertainment industry too, so you can’t blame entities for supplying that recycled garbage if there is an actual demand for it. So it is us as citizens that need to stop purchasing and hence supporting these unoriginal knock-offs. Yet is this really the only way movie studios will stop making these risk-free cash-cows? In our world yes. The music industry is facing such a serious situation today, yet they still aren’t wising up to the fact that they need to make some sort of changes to their current business model…suing its customers, giving them an inferior product in the form of DRM restricted tracks, and continuing to price products way over their costs is definitely not the way to go. As this article about the Pirate’s Dilemma points out, piracy in the end is forcing these industries to become more innovative and reinventing capitalism altogether. Let’s hope that piracy can, very ironically, prove to be the force that leads to more innovation.

-Technology: With Warner Bros. recently announcing its adoption of the Blu-Ray format, it has all but won the latest technology war over its nemesis HD-DVD. But anyone who has done research into the topic will realize that HD-DVD is the best format for the people: machines are cheaper, discs are cheaper, backwards compatible with DVDs, and more features that the Blu-Ray. However in our current capitalist system it is Sony’s Blu-Ray that won with rumoured buy-offs of around a half billion dollars for Warners Bros alone. Similarly, other movie studios sided with Blu-Ray because it was the better format protecting their‘intellectual property’. So in the end, a couple of large corporations decided a format war over the mass consumer base’s wishes and discouraged once again any innovators wishing to take on bigger and larger organizations.

– 

Yes it is an undeniable truth that these very same companies that appear to be leading the drive towards innovation are in fact the ones hindering it. With the industry and market firmly in their grasp, they can continue to deliver less than ideal products at the expense of consumers, and restrict those who wish to compete against them. Ironic, tragic, greedy, evil – all words that in someway describe this dark force that controls our future. But is our world really entrapped in this far less than ideal model with no way out? Was this the system we fought countless Wars of global magnitude to achieve? In this age where the largest companies have more power than most nations, where globalization and free trade are only increasing there economic and political clout – is there anything we can do to fight against this seemingly impenetrable stronghold? Innovation, in other words the progress of humankind and life in general, hangs in the very balance.

(to be continued in part 2…)