FROM THE JAWS OF CRISIS, BOLD EXPERIMENTATION

By Mark Sommer and - - Reprint | | Print |

This column is available for visitors to the IPS website only for reading. Reproduction in print or electronic media is prohibited. Media interested in republishing may contact romacol@ips.org.

ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Feb 4 2009 (IPS) - In May 1932, with the United States and Europe mired in a devastating depression, then-presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt counselled his countrymen not to cower in fear but to rekindle the animating myth of “the American experiment”: “The country needs and demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”

FDR’s words fit our times and provide a bracing injection of willed optimism to balance President Obama’s sombre declaration of “a new era of responsibility”.

Historians tell us that despite the reduction of financial resources available, economic downturns have proven to be the most fertile moments for innovative activity. A great deal of innovation occurs in good times as well, but this generally consists of incremental modifications of existing prototypes, less related to meeting needs than to stimulating and fulfilling non-essential desires. But when those needs are more urgently felt, the inventive impulse is intensified, producing breakthroughs and system-shifting inventions.

When all systems, from the economy and environment to conflict and public health, converge at the edge of collapse, the focus of our collective ingenuity turns decisively towards meeting common needs. As essayist Samuel Johnson once observed, “The prospect of hanging in a fortnight concentrates the mind wonderfully.”

The good news in the cascade of terrifying statistics is that we are about to enter an era of unprecedented experimentation. This innovation transformation will occur not only in technological invention but also in our social relationships at all levels -in our habits, attitudes, institutions and behaviour. At moments like these, everything is called into question. Indeed, history itself is asking whether we will continue to use our incomparable ingenuity to undermine our collective well-being or to reinvent the way we live on the basis of sustainability and the common good.

We are also on the cusp of a flowering of life-affirming human creativity equal in genius and far larger in its reach and scope than the Renaissance. A convergence of crises is matched by a convergence of capabilities in information, insight, communications, and collaboration that, if guided by wisdom, will spur us to make chasm-spanning leaps of collective intelligence.

The model that will drive this innovation transformation is the open source movement that created the Internet two decades ago. That was a collective effort by thousands of computer “nerds” who neither sought nor earned fame nor financial reward but simply the chance to contribute to a worthy shared enterprise. The Internet is an innovation commons where information is freely exchanged and users build easily on the results of one another’s experiments.

The challenges we now face are of such complexity and interconnectedness that their solution will require both a wider range of perspectives and participants and better communication among them than can be gathered from even the most brilliant team of specialists.

One of our most crucial social inventions will be more efficient processes to enlist and organise the information and insights of expanded circles of stakeholders in the solution of a given problem. Essential as they are, experts are by no means enough. Indeed, it was our misplaced trust in one-dimensional financial ‘wizards’ that led to the current economic catastrophe. Only the cross-pollination of specialists, independent innovators, and laymen will yield the breadth of perspective and depth of experience needed to produce robust solutions.

Promising experiments are already underway to tap into the “distributed intelligence” of global publics with specialised knowledge but no organisational or geographic affiliation with one another. Often called “crowd-sourcing”, they utilise an “open innovation” model in contrast to the 20th century approach of closed-circuit innovation, where the best engineers were sequestered in private laboratories and tasked with designing proprietary inventions. Open innovation advocates urge that we harvest insights and information from every relevant source.

Following this strategy, Innocentive, a private web-based operation spun off from the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, brings together corporations, academic institutions, public sector and nonprofit organisations with a global network of 160,000 engineers, scientists, inventors, and business people with expertise in life sciences, engineering, chemistry, mathematics, computer science, and entrepreneurship in an Open Innovation Marketplace. There, “Seekers” can post problems to be solved and “Solvers” can browse the Innocentive site (www.innocentive.com) by “Discipline” or “Pavilion” and take on a range of highly specific design challenges for rewards ranging from USD 5,000 to 1 million.

Once we grasp the positive potential at the heart of this terrifying moment, we can make use of adversity to fuel a transformation of the many systems, human and technological, that must be reinvented to address a radically different reality. In the process, we will regain confidence in ourselves, one another, and our shared posterity.

In the same speech in which he called for bold experimentation, FDR called on fearful Americans to adopt the innate optimism of youth. “We need the courage of the young,” he said. “Yours is not the task of making your way in the world, but of remaking the world which you will find before you.” (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

(*) Mark Sommer hosts the award-winning, internationally-syndicated radio programme, A World of Possibilities (www.aworldofpossibilities.org).