Innovation Partnership
Posted Feb 29, 2012 11:06:06 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
In a lecture at The Centre for International Governance Innovation, the US Ambassador to Canada, David Jacobson spoke about the innovation partnership between Canada and the United States.
It focused on the culture of innovation and getting back to the roots of what made North America a leader in innovation. Ambassador Jacobson pointed to simple things like, taking time out of your day to talk with someone, as a way to ignite creativity. “When was the last time you had lunch with a colleague, just to chat about what they were working on, just to ask them what they were thinking about, just to try to cross pollinate your ideas? When you don’t take that time to do that, our innovation, all of our innovation suffers.”
Jacobson even used Research in Motion as an example. “I don’t know how Jim Balsille and Mike Lazaridis came up with the BlackBerry. My guess is that it had something to do with people sitting down and talking with each other.”
Jacobson also used Bell Labs, a company who led the way in innovation between the 20’s and 80’s, as an example of how creativity can flourish if given the time to do so. Worker interaction was the key. “This is not the world that we live in today. We telecommute. If we want to go really slow, we make a telephone call. More likely we send an email or we tweet.”
Another key factor for Bell Labs success was time. “I do believe that we are sacrificing something, not just personally but creativity, when we don’t work together in places with a critical mass of thinkers. When we reduce our personal interactions to fleeting electronic messages. When we move too fast, we lose some of our ability to innovate.”
Jacobson went on to say that companies need to get away from the tyrannies of sales and quarterly profits and allow time for innovation.
