Big Potatoes: A London Manifesto for Innovation (@bigpotatoes)

I have long believed that what many people these days call "Innovation" is often just "continuous improvement that won't rock the boat". Thus over the last year or so I collaborated with a team of talents - Norman Lewis, Nico Macdonald, Martyn Perks, Mitchell Sava, James Woudhuysen (we first worked together looking at the role of Innovation in the Great Depression for NESTA) - and we have authored Big Potatoes: The London Manifesto for Innovation

The Manifesto can be read on the Big Potatoes website and we want your responses to it - urgently. We are also on Twitter over here and on Facebook over here

We are going to launch it next Tuesday night from 6.45 at the The Royal Society (7 Carlton House Terrace, London - book here ) and over the next few months we will also be hosting public discussions and debates around the themes of the Manifesto in London and beyond. And during the forthcoming UK general election we will be challenging those who propose to lead us out of recession to respond to the Manifesto principles.

Later in the year we will publish an updated Manifesto, having determined the scope of the challenge we face and started to change the culture around and climate for innovation globally.

The link above goes to the main manifesto, but below is my precis of it:

1. Think Big

Innovation must set its sights high, and can never do things by halves.

Today, too much of what many people (especially in Corporates) call Innovation could instead be called “Continuous Improvement”. Business expenditure on research and development (R&D), taken as a fraction of GDP, and has been stagnant in America and Europe for 15 years or more. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development talks up what it calls ‘the central importance of non technological innovation’. We argue that it’s not enough – it’s essential to uphold the powerful improvements, above all in productivity, that both new techniques and technologies can bring.

2. Go beyond the post-war legacy of innovation

We believe that Innovation today no longer means what it did in 1909, 1949 or 1969.

Many people believe that today there is more innovation and more change than ever before. Our research shows that view is not true, however (see here). There was a huge spurt of innovation roughly 100 years ago that produced many, even most, of the innovations that still define our world today - electric power and motors, organic chemistry and synthetics, the internal combustion engine and automotive devices, aircraft, telephones, radio, organised labour, female and black emancipation, public health and universal education all emerged around 1900

World War Two and the Cold War period also drove huge levels of innovation, for example in aerospace, space technology and its multiple offshoots, operations research, information technology, The first moon landing and the first DARPANet (the internet) transmission were both in 1969.

Today Innovation too often means “doing things a bit better” at best, and at worst is a politically acceptable means of ensuring a comfortable lack of boat rocking as things slide.


3. Principles not Models

Innovation is based on new knowledge, or it is nothing.

Innovation cannot prosper without curiosity, serendipity, unpredictable outcomes, inspiring vision, and sheer hard work. But these things are principles, not models of innovation. Today’s over-focus on short term market forces limit innovation, it is too big to be placed on a hockey stick of initial loss followed by profitability, or on a tapering S-curve of market saturation.

Nor should the state insist that innovation fit into the straitjackets it lays down. In practice one model of innovation dominates today – that it’s wrong to focus on pioneering new technologies. For examples, Britain’s National Endowment For Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) tells us to emphasise ‘business innovation’, not the technological sort..


4. We’re For Useless Research

Innovation is nothing without unremitting curiosity and tenacious application.

The fundamental unpredictability of research nourishes new experimental methods, turns up new problems, and opens up fresh avenues of enquiry. As a result, research creates not simply incremental advance, but, in many cases, whole new industries.

What have we learned from the last 100 years if not that what may be thought ‘useless’ research today may, in two or more decades’ time, become profoundly useful.


5. Innovation is Hard Work

Innovation is not done in a day. It is a struggle uphill, one step forward for every two back, and there is plenty that is noble in that.

It offends contemporary sensibilities to say so, but what Thomas Edison famously said of genius – that it is one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration – remains largely true of innovation. But nor does innovation grow on trees. Serendipity is important in science, but as Louis Pasteur said,

In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind’
There is no need to revive the moralism of the Protestant work ethic. But there is a need to destroy the myth that creativity is simply the playful re-combination of existing elements.. Innovation cannot just consist of combination; and anyway, combining the old takes a lot of hard work.


6. For success, expect lots of failures

In innovation, every failure is a success of sorts.

Today, innovation often feels called upon to apologise for the drain on resources it represents, and for the dangers it may bring. No wonder it just as often strives to portray itself as broadly predictable.

To gain support, it can pretend to be a smooth process, uninterrupted by false turns, intractable difficulties, personal clashes, or budgetary mishaps.

In fact, though, a single serious innovation is invariably preceded by multiple failures. There is no need to be sentimental about failure being a badge of honour in Silicon Valley, or to be fascinated by failure. Insights were gained by these “failures, that led to new successes”. In the future, separate innovations may help re-set this set of poor results, or that project stupidly terminated, in a brighter context.


7. Regard chance and surprise as allies

For Innovation, the concept of the unexpected deserves continued acclaim, for that shows confidence in human ingenuity.

In 1928, while on holiday, the Scots biologist and pharmacologist Alexander Fleming accidentally left a number of cultures of staphylococcus bacteria uncovered. He returned to find the growth of bacteria in one dish inhibited a growing blue-green fungus, Penicillium notatum. From the microwave oven through the Post-it note and on to the Viagra pill, serendipity – a random turn of events that proves fortuitous – has played a major role in the process of innovation.

Yet though 21st century managers always say they’re ready for ‘out of the box’ thinking, in practice many bridle at the idea of an innovation project moving sideways. Why should chance, tangential discoveries absorb researchers in the unexpected, the unfamiliar, the difficult, and the costly?


8. Take risks

We believe that we risk major difficulties today not because of too much innovation, but because of too little.

In 2005, China’s engineers and scientists completed a new railway. Splicing through mountains five kilometres high and underground rock formations where the temperatures run at -30°C, the new line stretches from Golmud in the province of Qinghai to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. No fewer than 1,142 km long, it was finished three years ahead of schedule. The railway is a triumph not just of engineering, but also of conscious risk-taking. Barriers thought very hard to overcome were proved surmountable.

But that sequence of events, in which risks are confronted, is a relative rarity these days.
For some years even before the credit crunch, organisations made the management of risk into a fearful obsession. Heaven forbid we should actually take a risk in Innovation.


9. Leadership

Innovation demands not further empathy, trust or Key Performance Indicators, but vision, commitment, brains and, yes, a little personal heroism too.

The more the cult of celebrity extends into everyday life, it seems, the more distaste grows for celebrating leaders of innovation. Yet for some years the trend in general management theory has been away from the charismatic leader and toward the servant leader or the self-confessedly incomplete one. Today, the leader is vulnerable or he is nothing. There are enough New Age experts on leadership today, too. Some believe that happiness and managing your energy levels are two of the five dimensions of leadership.
In fact what innovation needs now, if it is to be game-changing, unique and unexpected, is leaders with resolve, not managers with finely balanced scalpels and balanced energy levels.


10. Innovation is everybody’s responsibility

Innovation is not just a concern for private firms, large and small. In different ways, it is also for nations, public sector organisations, and for other, ‘third sector’ bodies.

If innovation is for every substantial body in society, it is not for everyone, sadly enough. After all, science and technology require specialisation, so that not every person can be an innovator. Anyway, innovation is, as we have said, bigger than science and technology alone. It encompasses changes in organisation. It can include changes in design.

The role of design and branding, however, is not to engage in special pleading that would make them a substitute for new technology. They should stop wringing their hands about involving users and saving the planet, and instead start taking seriously their role as the humanising handmaidens of technological innovation.


11. Trust the people, not regulation

The desire and energy to innovate come from neither the unconscious hand of the market, nor the restless malfeasance of the modern bureaucratic state. It comes from you, me, or someone yet more qualified

The Regulators do not trust the people, the people do not trust the Regulators. Partisans of innovation need to take the right side in this dispute. It’s time for them to state unequivocally that further state laws and regulations around innovation are in general likely to circumscribe it and slow it down, not enhance it. You don’t even have to be a believer in free market forces to agree with that.
The failures of regulation, its tendency to produce perverse results, its tendency to reinforce powerful interests – these things are much more given in regulation than they are in innovation. Right now, the world has too much of the wrong kind of regulation, and not enough of any kind of innovation.


12. Think Global, Act Global

Innovation needs to be internationalist in thought and deed.

The innovator should aim to benefit the whole world, not any particular purse or nation. He or she should know about and uphold the achievements of innovators abroad, and oppose all attempts to pervert or stunt innovation there.

Innovations come from people. That those people operate in corporate or government buildings should not be a restriction


13. The spirit of innovation knows no limits

Innovation must be open to anything and everything.

Since 1972, the self-evident fact that there is only one Earth has been repeated like a mantra. In 2008 the WWF introduced its state of the world report with the amazing observation that ‘We have only one planet’. It went on to argue that ‘by the mid-2030s we will need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles,’ and today insists that ‘Humanity’s demands exceed our planet’s capacity to sustain us’. Similarly we see complaints that research in Space is wasted and would be better spent on the people.

These accounts do little justice to the role of innovation, which must mediate between human beings and the planet. Where, as with climate change, genuine environmental problems exist, innovation should never be underrated in its ability to deal with them.


14. By, For, With Humanity

Innovation is done by human beings, and not by nature or by machines.

‘Discontent’, Oscar Wilde said, ‘is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation’. Although not a force for democracy in itself, innovation has nevertheless assisted when it is done with the participation of more people. Innovation is for humanity.

In 1625, the philosopher Francis Bacon wrote an essay called Of Superstition. He held that the causes of superstition arose, in part, from what he called ‘barbarous times, especially joined with calamities and disasters’. This Manifesto is issued because humanity faces such times now.

This Manifesto is a call to arms. Let all those who agree with most of it stand up and be counted.

We are not advocating any policies… at this point. ‘What policies are you advocating?’ is always the battle cry of the impatient entrepreneur or government official. This debate is too important for it to become enmeshed in policy discussions. We need this debate in order to clarify the issues at stake, and to scope what needs to be done to reinvigorate a culture of innovation in contemporary society. Innovation is not something that can be turned on and off like a tap. It is a complex interplay between economics, politics and culture – from how we inspire and educate younger generations, to our attitude towards scientific discovery and risk-taking, from the arts to long-term thinking and investment – and pursuing it requires clarity of thought and purpose.

We hope BIG POTATOES will help inspire a debate that illuminates the scope of this challenge. Only then will it be meaningful and practical to talk about the policy implications of these insights.

So - come along next Tuesday evening. Speakers so far include Steven Cousins, managing director, Axon Automotive Ltd; Eliot Forster, CEO, Solace Pharmaceuticals; Norman Lewis, Chief Innovation Officer, Open-Knowledge (and BIG POTATOES co-author); Munira Mirza, advisor for arts and culture to the Mayor of London; Stefan Stern, management columnist, Financial Times; and James Wilsdon, Director of the Science Policy Centre, The Royal Society.

So, will you chip in to the Big Potatoes debate? Should be a good night, we think!