Innovation and the Prosperity of Nations

At the recent Competitiveness Summit, the connections between business and innovation were made starkly clear

by Nico Macdonald

In November 2005 the UK Treasury published the Cox Review of Creativity in Business, addressing “a question that is vital to the UK’s long-term economic success—namely, how to exploit the nation’s creative skills more fully” where the “emphasis is on the use made of creative skills by smaller businesses, with particular concern for manufacturing.”

This December the UK Design Council, of which report author Sir George Cox is Chairman, convened the Competitiveness Summit ’06 in London to brief people on progress with implementation of the report’s recommendations and ‘build momentum’ around it. Specifically the Summit was intended to showcase the role of creativity and design in UK competitiveness, discuss how they may be further embedded, and examine future trends; consider threats and opportunities from abroad; and examine the role of education and its relationship to industry.

The Competitiveness Summit was probably the most serious and eminent design event in the UK in the last five years, though the balance of the audience was from the design and consultancy industries, government policy and funding, and education, rather than the ‘client side’ of the equation.

“My report contains no originality at all,” Sir George Cox told the assembly in his opening keynote—though he reported the interest it had generated in the US and the Middle East, and at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting at which he had presented.

Innovation “will dictate the economic prosperity of nations,” Cox observed, but the weakness of the UK is “not being able to take full advantage of this.” We produce people in art schools who don’t understand the language of the business world, he noted, and business people who don’t understand how to manage innovation. How can we combine their skills?

Considering the much debated threat of China and India he argued they also represent great potential, but to take advantage of this we will need “wit and imagination, and to be able to innovate.”

Bill Sermon, Vice President, Design at Nokia Multimedia, described how each operating group in the Finnish champion has a head of design—an arrangement which is wholly unfamiliar to UK plc. “We are a people-led business,” he said, and their needs drive creativity and innovation. He described how the company brings in people from outside, whose involvement is “not just focus groups, but creating with us.”

He characterised Britain’s approach as asking “what is our defensive position in the wider world?” and argued that “we lose speed and agility when we start watching the competition.” Despite this, he noted that Nokia was keen to be in the UK today, as it is a great crossover point “where the world wants to meet.”

Among his observations and recommendations were the lack of ‘joined-up’ design representation in the UK; the need to focus on quality over quantity in design schools, and their failure to exploit their alumni; and the importance of design being represented on the boards of companies. There are four new design research labs in opening in the UK in next year [including a Nokia lab], he observed in conclusion, and asked “What are we going to do with them?”

Responding to the question ‘Is UK competitiveness imperilled by developing economies catching up with us?’ John Thackara, Director of Doors of Perception, and programme director of the Designs of the time (Dott 07) project, challenged some of the assumptions underlying the Summit. “We are all emerging economies now”, he argued, more “wrongly developed” than advanced. He noted that the Stern Review [on the Economics of Climate Change], with its focus on external costs, is a radical change in how we measure economic success, and “paves the way for a new scoring system.” “Who will be competitive?” he asked.