A reef made of silicon

In the early 1990s, a seasoned executive shared a metaphor that has stayed with me ever since: he said that innovation is like a coral reef. Marine biologists don’t fully understand what causes reefs to form, he said, but we do know that human actions can nurture or harm the process. The same is true for innovation—a natural, chaotic, unpredictable process that is hard, perhaps even impossible, for well-meaning outsiders to foster. If we try to control or micromanage innovation, we risk squeezing out the very life forces that give rise to successful new ideas. Instead, we must focus on finding ways to nurture and accelerate the natural processes of innovation once they’ve begun organically.

For almost half a century, Silicon Valley has been the most compelling example of a healthy innovation ecosystem in the United States. Yes, the dot-com implosion and now the global credit crisis have dampened the valley’s exuberant spirits, and the exotic Italian sports cars in the parking lots of Sand Hill Road seem jarringly out of keeping with the somber reality of our times. But even after the deluge, Silicon Valley is the kind of reef ecosystem we should support and nurture across our nation.

It’s important to note that Silicon Valley’s remarkable ecosystem was not the result of a grand plan hatched by a civic or political leader. It developed organically, beginning as far back as the Great Depression, when Stanford University students Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett started tinkering in Packard’s Palo Alto garage. It’s also important to note that there has never been a defined, structured way to connect the dots in the valley. Instead, this organic ecosystem, with its interrelated professional and personal networks, has allowed the dots to connect themselves. A good example of this phenomenon is the remarkable TED conference which brings together the brightest minds in a wide range of fields to advance its mission of spreading ideas.

Spreading the success

Of course, Silicon Valley is not the only ecosystem of commercial and social innovation in America; the other highly innovative centers include Boston/Cambridge, the Potomac River region, Raleigh/Durham, Seattle/Redmond, San Diego, and others. Most of these regions and the nation as a whole, however, default to linear thinking with formal structures to define and control innovation. What we need instead is to turn the forces of innovation loose—to create the right conditions for that reef ecosystem to grow on its own and take hold. These regions need to emulate Silicon Valley’s seamless flow of knowledge, ideas, and people.

If you look, you will find astonishing examples of innovation, even in the unlikeliest places. Take Greenville, Mississippi, one of the most economically depressed communities in the United States and now the test site for an innovative environmental venture of global significance. The community is planting thousands of acres of bamboo, the fastest sequesterer of carbon dioxide, using a new cloning technique that will dramatically decrease the time it takes to produce mature bamboo forests.

But innovators like these are often disconnected, operating in silos, without the financial resources and strategic support they need to bring their ideas to fruition. They do not swim in a teeming, healthy reef ecosystem.

Toward a national innovation strategy

I have come to believe that nurturing innovation at the national level will require two kinds of approaches—top down and bottom up.

First, our nation needs an overarching framework—perhaps it could be called a national innovation strategy—that would define a shared vision, create a clear direction, and identify priorities for innovation. This strategy could be drafted, outside the political process, by a presidential commission made up of the most outstanding innovators and thinkers from a host of relevant disciplines and quarterbacked by a high-profile “innovation czar” appointed by the president.

The priorities might naturally start with the president’s top three, spelled out in his address to the joint session of Congress in January: developing clean, renewable energy; controlling the cost of health care; and making education more accessible. The commission would also have to embrace other needs, such as the enormous challenge of rebuilding our infrastructure and developing more robust emergency response and homeland security systems.

Take something as basic as the rebuilding of our highways, bridges, and rail systems. Right now, our stimulus dollars are buying the status quo rather than the smarter, longer-lasting, more cost-effective systems that would provide a quantum leap forward. For example, we now have the technology to embed our roads and bridges with microsensors that, interconnected into a “nervous system,” could reduce traffic congestion, improve maintenance, and enable far better decision making by governments. Similarly, whenever a jurisdiction considers new road projects, it should determine whether it could also enhance its telecommunications infrastructure by laying fiber-optic cable at the same time.

We ought to apply this same “let’s break the mold” thinking across the board—from how we educate our children to how we could have higher-quality health care at lower cost.

To put us on an innovation path, this national strategy would have to identify, to the fullest extent possible, the specific inflection or tipping points (or both) within each of the priority areas. These points would be opportunities where targeted investments in innovation, from the public, private, and philanthropic sectors, could have a disproportionate impact over the long term. On a smaller scale, this approach can be seen in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s $100 million Grand Challenges initiative. With the help of scientists all over the world, the foundation identified 14 health challenges that, if solved, would dramatically improve life prospects for the world’s poor. Then it offered very large grants to researchers who come forward with innovative approaches to these challenges.

In addition, the presidential commission described above could identify all the ways the federal government can support innovators and remove outdated legislative and regulatory barriers to innovation. The Washington Monthly’s recent special section on entrepreneurship contains several compelling examples of how government policies can stifle progress. One such example involves energy: entrepreneurs are eager to seize the potential of converting our outdated electric power systems to a smart grid but face daunting regulatory hurdles, thanks to a century-old regulatory scheme that rewards inefficiency.

An even bigger and more foolish barrier to innovation is the US immigration system. We invest huge amounts of money in educating the world’s best and brightest foreign engineers and scientists in our top universities—and then kick them out of the country. As a New York Times article documents beautifully, the foreign-born innovators and entrepreneurs who managed to navigate our immigration system have had an enormous impact on the success of Silicon Valley’s innovation ecosystem. We need to reform immigration to attract and retain the kind of top talent and potential innovators that are well represented in Silicon Valley. We should be just as welcoming to those who may not fit the high-profile innovator role, but who have the cleverness, desire and work ethic to create small businesses that, over time, will grow to add to the backbone of our middle class
We’ll need bottom-up approaches. For example, building on the mass-collaboration methodology used by innovative companies and outlined in a New York Times article, the administration could create a federal innovation stock exchange and open it to any of the federal government’s 4.2 million employees who wanted to float out-of-the-box solutions for tough societal challenges or new types of innovations with the potential to fuel our economic engine.

In my business life, I saw firsthand how innovative those who serve in government can be. Every year, the Partnership for Public Service presents the Service to America awards, honoring the contributions and innovations of federal employees—such as the one whose discovery led to the development of a vaccine for the virus that causes a majority of cervical cancers around the world. However, the sad fact is that federal employees are rarely asked to be innovative. The innovation stock exchange could motivate federal employees and provide this significant and relevant pool of talent with the means to express its ideas in a new, more public way. Ideas listed on the stock exchange could also spark additional ideas from inside and outside the federal government. Federal employees whose innovations were adopted could receive some form of bonus, as well as recognition from the president. If this worked for the federal government, one could imagine a network of innovation stock exchanges in which states, metropolitan regions, large universities, hospitals, and civic-minded corporations would put in place similar mechanisms to advance innovations addressing key social and economic needs.

With a national strategy, as well as efforts to seed creative chaos from the bottom up, the Obama administration could put America on the right path for the long term. Unleashing, channeling, and connecting millions of innovative minds across all regions, all disciplines, and all walks of life is the most important form of long-term stimulus the president can provide. It is the key to nurturing our national coral reef.

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