Innovation Fostering
What are the best conditions for fostering innovation? I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.
Wisnioski: Historically, I think our ideas about innovation and what fosters it come out of new emerging environments.
Matt Wisnioski is an associate professor in the department of science, technology and society at Virginia Tech. He says that recent history gives us several models for encouraging innovation.
Wisnioski: After the Second World War, we looked to Bell Laboratories, for example, as a place that generates a whole range of really significant and important technologies – highest among them transistors. You have these managers who are looking around and saying, “We’ve got these brilliant Nobel Prize winning scientists and we have these other people who are really good at getting technologies to market, what are the environments that foster them for collaborative work to happen?” You need to give people the time to explore their own ideas, in addition to working on a set of directed kind of projects. Innovation, in that sense, is something like a closed ecosystem. It’s all within the context of one company and one organization that’s trying to do this.
Then, people look to the rise of Silicon Valley and they say, “Wait a second, this is a really different model for fostering technological innovation.” In this case, you’ve got an entire region, you have people moving from company to company, you have people working in different kinds of industries. You have this strange, hippie environment where there’s a fluidity of ideas. There are scientists and engineers who are engaged with metaphysics. There are also these kind of really rapidly moving markets. There’s a lot of venture capital. You create this more open kind of ecosystem. People have since tried to draw on those ideas and create innovation districts and innovation communities and to build up spaces for fostering innovation.
We’ll hear more on innovation in future programs. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.