The 10 habits of mass innovation

The UK needs an intrinsic story of innovation, not one that is forced upon us by the competition. It needs to be a story about what we can become as a nation.

Sitting in a plush hotel lobby in downtown Beijing, Li Gong, head of Microsoft's internet business in China, an alumni of Sheffield University, put the UK's national challenge this way: "China is the world's fastest growing economy. The US is the home of high-tech and Hollywood. What is the UK's one line pitch to the world?"

The following day a dispiriting answer was delivered by a group of students recently graduated from China's most prestigious university, Tsinghua, in an area of Beijing which alone hosts 50 universities (altogether the UK has 120) that together graduate 100,000 scientists and engineers each year.

They revealed that the country that produced Newton and Shakespeare, Darwin and Dickens, the Beatles and Britart was largely known for Premiership football and rain, island isolationism and Mr Bean.

Those snapshots from a recent visit to China reveal the way the world is shifting: not just goods and services but ideas and innovation are coming from many more places at low cost and high quality.

Being vague about what the UK stands for is a luxury the country can ill afford. This Provocation argues that the answer must be to position ourselves as a society of mass innovation, a place where creativity and innovation are everyday activities, practised in many settings, by many people.

Innovation as not just something done for the masses but by the masses.

Published
December 2006

Author
Charles Leadbeater

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