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| How to turn Science & Technology into Innovation? |
  Why is innovation a buzzword in the UN Millennium project? Why the term “innovation” has replaced “Science & Technology” (ST) in the name of the organization in charge in many countries since the 90s? Why there was a boom of governmental and non-governmental organizations on innovation? Why innovation has become a hot research topic and major at universities? Why the national bodies for innovation in almost all countries are inter-ministerial committee (or council) and not a line ministry covering a separate sector? Answering well these questions might help understand the importance and superiorities of innovation over the ST model.
Innovation is not merely Science & Technology ST uses Money to create Knowledge whereas Innovation just does the opposite. ST results primarily in inventions, patents, standardized knowledge, theories, structures whilst Innovation focuses on using all the above mentioned to create values. ST focuses on the upstream of the value chain involving primarily inventors and seldom businesspersons or tech adopters; Innovation cares both up and down stream of the value chain involving inventors, lots more businesspersons, tech adopters, related stakeholders and countless consumers. Innovators need to know not only explicit ST knowledge, but also all intermediate products of the whole process, regulations, business models, networking skills with all kinds of stakeholders, etc. Whilst ST stops at invention, Innovation brings economic results with the help of brain and passion. That explains for the difference between technological innovation and non-technological innovation. Instead of being practical and efficient, ST in developing countries and Vietnam is fond of fancy trends like “technological breakthrough”, “high-tech”, “source technologies”, etc.
The following table shows the main differences between ST and Innovation model spelling out the effectiveness of the latter.
Innovation does not require much knowledge on ST but lots of entrepreneurship, tacit knowledge, business passion and instinct, in- and outsourcing, supply chain, value chain, technological map, strategy at technological window opportunities and technological crisis, IPR business, technological trends, production, marketing, distribution, consumers’ tastes, behavior, etc. That explains why technology business is very strong in the US and why those working in US Silicon Valley are more sort of business people and not technology gurus.
Innovation supporting projects like the Innovation Partnership Program (IPP) of Finland for Vietnam, therefore, adopt a comprehensive approach, which is not limited to ST. The IPP supports not only “traditional” ST activities, but also on the weaknesses of Vietnam’s technology based firms such as promoting intra-sectoral activities, finance-credit, incubation, technological strategy, creativity, etc. IPP supported selected areas base on thoughtful consideration of Viet Nam’s strengths, weaknesses, capability, success rate and the chance for regional and international cooperation.
Challenges of Innovation
Innovation requires a high interdisciplinary approach. It requires not only knowledge, experience but also mindset, lifestyle and culture. Being involved in many sectors, innovation is certainly hindered and “hampered" by rules, regulations and the lack of cooperation.
For Viet Nam, the challenge of innovation lies in the fact that this country has not gone through the natural course of self-development of an industrial society. This led to weak infrastructures, hard and soft, like in legal system, lifestyle, mindset and culture. That explains why we find good innovation in the developed countries. Innovation activities, which are for them natural or a matter of course, may seem strange and difficult to understand to us. We lack explicit knowledge and more than that, the common senses, subconsciousness and instincts for innovation which by-pass logical thinking and are much more difficult to “learn”.
For real innovation, we are expected to do activities neither accustomed to us nor covered by the functions, tasks set by regulations. Some of the tasks are difficult to do due to the lack of mechanism, regulations, especially those of intra-sectoral ones. The setting up of agencies supporting enterprise technology, creating ST-based firms, incubators, commercializing ST, integrating into ST supply chain, etc. by the Ministry of Science & Technology show that they are moving from old model of ST in the right track toward Innovations.
Innovation requires also an appropriate mechanism on how government and ministries work together and how to run interministerial activities and projects, etc. Taskforce consisting of many experts, each from a discipline, is less efficient than having fewer but multi-disciplinary experts. For innovation, Vietnam is lacking of such multi-disciplinary experts, especially in the interface between technology-business-economics.
Major innovation challenge is that we have to start at where we are weakest.
These challenges are, for Vietnam’s public as well as private organizations and firms, among others the based-on-change-approach, the management of complexity, uncertainty and risk. Efficient innovation is not based on rigid structure and mechanism but rather an open, dynamic, fully interactive and fuzzy game. Vietnam’s difficulty at incubator program is a typical example for its embarrassments and failure to adapt itself to the “open” and flexible mechanisms of innovation. Despite four projects by international organizations since 2001 with training and trials, incubator in true sense is still non-existing in Viet Nam even it is the most appropriate model for developing business, nurturing start-ups, especially technology-based ones. Main reason for that is that the “open”, flexible, multi-functional organization with inter-sectoral activities are difficult to be established since they have to observe many (sometime conflicting) regulations from different ministries. They are simply not “acceptable” since people do not have regulation for govern them.
Amidst the fast of technological and social changes, managing innovation is managing the Unknown. It is the effort to “know” the Unknown. Unlike the management of the tangibles, innovation should be managed with lots of support, facilitation, nurturing and less “control” which may hinder or evenstifleinnovation. In ST development, we will know more. However, in good innovation, we will know more that we do not know. ST is looking for the Answer whereas innovation is always seeking problems and posing questions.
For Viet Nam now, innovation is the means to survive. Viet Nam is seeking a model (and a philosophy) for its development when the old path is no longer suitable and the new one yet to be found. For this purpose, innovation should not only mean knowledge, rules, a project, or program but a culture, sort of passion (Inno-Mania). Genuine and voluntary innovation is not from being conferred (or taught by someone) but rather self-awakening. Therefore, the first innovation is to innovate ourselves. The most difficult self-innovation is moving from the Zero-Sum-Behavior at the constant cake and coming to the Coo-Petition-Mindset with ever enlarging cake. For the sake of innovations, according to J. Keynes “the difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones”.
Dinh The Phong, 24-3-2012
(For Hannu, Janne and IPP Office in Vietnam ) Newer news items:
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