Who Should Participate in Building the Innovation Nation?

“As all these trends happen, the winners will be those who are able to participate fully in innovation-driven ecosystems.”

When you think of Switzerland, chocolate, watches, and mountains probably pop into your mind. However, what you may not know is that it’s the name of the country that’s more innovative than Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the rest of the world!

Notwithstanding the criticisms of the accuracy of the Global Innovation Index, which I discussed in a previous article , the fact that the Swiss innovation ecosystem has been ranked above the entire world for more than a dozen consecutive years surely means something. My curious question is, Who is behind this nonobvious supremacy? Is it government officials, CEOs’ of large corporations, university presidents, investors, startups, or individuals?

As I’ve listed in a previous article what the types of innovation ecosystems are and discussed in another one how to build a national one, I’ll focus in this article on who should be involved in the building process. Based on my humble experience of wearing most of the hats below in one way or another over the course of my professional life, I’ll list the various stakeholders who could help or hinder it, with a brief description of the role of each of their categories. Whatever your current position in your country, I promise you’ll find one or more ways to make your contribution to the big picture below, and you might even guess who the game changer in Switzerland was.

I.???? People Belonging to the Educational System

If you agree with me that the source of all innovations is knowledge and that one of the main missions of all national innovation ecosystems is to transfer knowledge into practical innovations in the market, then you won’t mind if I draw an analogy between knowledge and innovation as a seed and a fruit. That said, let’s look at the roles of the people involved in the education system, or in our analogy, the seed makers.

a.???? Education Officials

In the past, the mandate of education officials was mostly limited to providing basic education, literacy, and numeracy for most citizens and incentivizing them to pursue this knowledge. In the modern age, the mandate has expanded to include helping citizens to complete early childhood, primary, secondary, and higher education or vocational training programs. However, your mandate as an education official in the innovation age might be broader and deeper. Broader in the sense that it includes more types of education and training, such as lifelong, self-directed, open, and informal education, along with programs for gifted children and professional certificates. Deeper in the way that these educational and training programs create a perfect mix of specializations for the entire innovation journey in all targeted sectors. After all, a national innovation ecosystem cannot be built by technical or business individuals alone. Moreover, since the world of innovation is very dynamic, you could make the education system dynamic as well and compatible with every technology and business trend. Also, for an innovation nation, you could strive to make the entire education system directly or indirectly supportive of innovation. This is not limited to adding sections or exercises to textbooks. It could also include comparing schools, training institutes, and universities based on innovation-related criteria, such as the number of commercialized innovations per student, and making public funding decisions on this basis.

b.???? University Executives

It’s almost impossible to find a national or regional innovation ecosystem in the world that doesn’t have an innovation-driven university at its heart. As a university decision-maker, you could make it your mission to unleash your university’s innovative potential. First and foremost, you could strengthen the relationship between your researchers and the local business community as much as possible. For example, you could build research projects around the problem resources, products, corporations, startups, or competitive advantages of the university’s geographic region. This would pave the way for building a regional innovation ecosystem around the university. You could also arm the university by attracting faculty with years of industry experience and adding innovation and entrepreneurship courses to all academic programs. Furthermore, since most of the great innovative products and services we enjoy today involve more than one discipline, such as psychology, electronics, arts, business, and programming, you could initiate collaborative projects between researchers from various colleges; allow engineering students to take arts, and vice versa; award innovative projects that come from a team with different majors; and usher in the age of interdisciplinary innovation. Finally, you could build a wide network of innovation-related members who can provide your students with opportunities for mentorship, grants, business incubation, angel investment, and participation in local and international exhibitions and competitions.

c.???? School Executives

Almost all famous innovators have noted that their passion for innovation emerged before adulthood. This gives you, as a decision-maker in your school, a golden opportunity to turn your institution into an innovators factory. You could start by naming school activities, facilities, and perhaps even classrooms after inspiring local or international innovators and informing students about their stories through school events, bulletin boards, or posters. Well-promoted innovation exhibitions and competitions are still good ideas, but their impact could be greatly enhanced with a few extra touches. For example, you could restructure these competitions so that they involve teams of elected innovators from each class, and instead of awarding the prize to the best student, award it to the best class. All the members of the winning class, innovative and noninnovative, could go on an enjoyable trip as a reward. This should send a strong message to students to support their innovative peers.? You can also extend the impact of innovation competitions outside your school by involving the families of the innovative students in the award ceremony and by sharing the prize between the winning student and their parents in front of all of the families present. Finally, you can go even further by turning the school into a living experimental lab. For example, you could ask students to redesign the classroom blackboard, come up with innovative solutions to the school’s garbage problems, test their new ideas in front of everyone, and accept failing at their first attempts. The next stop could be solving neighborhood problems to show them how their ideas can be implemented in the real world.

d.???? University and School Instructors

Since you’ll be on the frontline meeting potential innovators face-to-face, your role in fostering innovation in your students is crucial. First, you could prepare for this mission by working in the industry for some time or obtaining entrepreneurship or innovation certificates. Then, you could adapt your courses to make them project-based, with each project solving a real market problem. It’s also better to create a class environment that encourages curiosity, critical thinking, brainstorming, experimentation, failure, and teamwork. You could take it to the next level by breaking away from the traditional structure and rules of the typical course. Examples include motivating students to supplement the textbook, inviting guest speakers from the market, organizing field visits, or awarding bonus marks to innovative students even if their exam grades were relatively low. Finally, you could inform the class that they can schedule an appointment during your office hours for one-on-one innovation mentoring sessions.

II- People Belonging to the Public and Nonprofit Sectors

Continuing with the seed–fruit analogy I introduced earlier, incorporating public bodies and nonprofit entities into this picture is not easy. This is because they represent the ideal climate for this seed to grow and turn into a fruit, a major influence that cannot be drawn in a picture. Likewise, these entities play a crucial role in operating behind the scenes.

a.???? Policymakers

I know that free-market advocates won’t like what I’m about to say, but the economics of the past, present, and perhaps the future show that a country cannot go very far in terms of innovation without the help of the government. That doesn’t mean that the government’s ideal role is to produce and sell innovations in the market itself, but rather to support and motivate innovative individuals and enterprises and to create a frictionless and fair national environment for their innovation journeys. As a policymaker, you could start by making sure that the country’s general infrastructure is compatible with all kinds of advanced innovations, as you cannot, for example, control self-driving vehicles in a city that does not have high-speed wireless internet. Then you could target the legal infrastructure and make it easy for innovators to protect their intellectual property rights, but hard to infringe on the rights of other innovators. Your legal policies could help innovators import the necessary ingredients for their unusual technologies, test the innovative concepts in the market without bureaucratic obstacles, and not go to jail when their innovative startups face bankruptcy. In short, the positive impact of your proposed innovation-related regulations will be greater if you keep one eye on emerging technology and business model trends around the world and another on what local innovators face in the field. In terms of innovation fields, should your local companies and research centers decide what to innovate by themselves? Well, my answer is yes and no. I’ll tell you why. Suppose that your country decides to start developing a national innovation strategy, which is a step I highly recommend for every country, then economics, technological, and business experts will be hired to develop your national innovation priorities. Here you’ll find that some of these priorities can be addressed with relatively small short-term investments, while others require large long-term investments. It has been found that in most cases, local companies and research centers tend to favor the former over the latter. Therefore, you could launch some governmental interventions to promote the riskier ones, such as tax incentives for companies and public grants for research centers. In this way, you can ensure a balance between short- and long-term innovation projects throughout the country.? Moreover, your policies could ensure the availability of skilled human resources for these companies and research centers, either by attracting talented immigrants from abroad, which is the easy way, or by developing local talent, which is the hard way. The list of possible policies to support innovation nationally goes on and on. You might also recommend policies that pave the way for local innovators to contract with international partners or policies that grant innovators full access to detailed national data on local supply and demand, opportunities, challenges, resources, and future forecasts.

Finally, I want to share an important concern with you. I hear economic liberals shouting at me that such government interventions can have unintended negative consequences, and I agree with them to some extent. Stay close to the implementation of the policies you propose, as it’s too easy for any policy to harm or mislead some stakeholders or be abused by others. It’s better to keep direct government support temporary, like a course of medication, and raise the red flag when government bodies start competing with companies or investors in the market or when government initiatives give some market players an unfair advantage over others. If this happens, you can make some smart modifications to mitigate the unintended consequences. For example, instead of approving an initiative to hire a few experts to provide free business advice to all potential innovators, which will cause all other business consulting firms to declare bankruptcy in the future due to the loss of clients, the initiative could be to give the potential innovator free paid vouchers that they can redeem at any consultancy firm they choose from the market. More discussion along these lines can be found in an article I published earlier .

b.???? Members of Public Entities

Although the popular stereotype is that public entities are not innovative, it’s time to prove them wrong. No matter the specialization or mission of your entity, there is always the possibility of engaging with internal and external innovators. Whether you are a top executive assigning initiatives to departments under your authority, a first-level employee suggesting ideas to your managers, or someone in between, you could start your entity’s innovation journey by equipping yourself with essential innovation and entrepreneurship short courses and certificates.

The next step might be to focus on supporting internal innovators through initiatives mentioned in the literature on organizational innovation and corporate innovation. These initiatives range from temporary programs, such as awareness campaigns, mini-conferences, and idea competitions, to permanent ones, such as R&D and social innovation labs, electronic platforms for idea management, and innovation showrooms.

When it comes to external innovators, you could help such individuals by providing them with inspiring data that your entity might disclose about opportunities, challenges, and future plans. If they come to you with ideas that you consider stupid, impractical, or simply unacceptable, do your best to be on their side with your knowledgeable advice, your entity’s services, and your words of encouragement. If they are an expert innovator, then you could put the possibility of hiring or contracting with them on the table. Supporting innovative companies might also be possible, but in different ways. For example, you could promote giving preference to innovative bidders for your entity’s procurements or suggest entering into a public–private partnerships (PPPs) with innovative companies for strategic projects.

c.???? Members of Nonprofit Organizations

Before transforming your nonprofit organization from a traditional charity to an innovative game changer, you could start by arming yourself with innovation and entrepreneurship techniques, especially those related to the fields of social innovation and social entrepreneurship. Similar to public entities, you could support your internal innovators through a vast collection of initiatives belonging to the fields of organizational innovation and corporate innovation. However, the untapped source of your organization’s innovation-related impact lies with its beneficiaries. Helping them innovate their way out of their problems could kill many birds with far fewer stones. For instance, if your organization is solving hunger in a certain community, you could spend all of your budget buying the healthiest food to distribute to them, which is an acceptable but unsustainable solution. However, if you could allocate a small percentage of that budget to innovative solutions, you could make magic happen. To be honest, I don’t have an exhaustive list of all the things you could do with that money, but it includes things like teaching the beneficiaries basic innovation and entrepreneurship concepts and tools and bringing in science, technology, economics, and business experts, along with volunteer innovators, to conduct countless brainstorming and design thinking sessions with the community’s trained innovators. Later, you could also use this money to help these trained community innovators prototype and pilot test the resulting ideas and perhaps turn successful ones into profitable social enterprises. Believe me, dear reader, this scenario is not a figment of my imagination. The world of social innovation and social entrepreneurship has plenty of real-life stories around the globe on this path.

III- People Belonging to the Private Sector

Back to the seed-fruit analogy. The process of turning the seed (knowledge) into a fruit (innovation) requires a farmer to oversee the growing process, water the plant, pick the fruit at the right time, and sell it for the highest price. I think you’ve already worked out that the farmer here represents the private sector.

a.???? Members of Corporations

From the CEO to the first-level employee in a company that wants to be innovation-driven in the future, the first suggestion is always to get short courses or certificates in innovation and entrepreneurship to equip yourself well for the journey. To be frank, I’m not sure about the order and direction of the next steps because every department in the company has a potential role to play in supporting internal and external innovators while benefiting the company in the short-term, long-term, or both. For example, the planning team could develop an innovation-driven strategy for the company that prevents it from following the lead of Blockbuster and Kodak. The budget team could align with this direction by allocating the R&D budget using the ambidextrous innovation method, meaning allocating a portion for incremental innovation that exploits opportunities within existing products and leaving the remaining budget for radical innovation that explores opportunities related to future products. In addition to its typical innovation-related day-to-day workflow, the R&D team could attract external innovators through open innovation initiatives and partner with local universities and research centers. Furthermore, the procurement team could favor innovative suppliers, and the partnerships and business development teams could build a mini-innovation ecosystem around the company’s products and supply chain. Moreover, the various teams responsible for acquiring companies from the market or spinoffs could consider innovation-related criteria when making these decisions. They could also explore innovative ways to make these strategic moves, such as creating a corporate venture builder. Even the corporate social responsibility (CSR) team could join the innovation movement by adopting social innovation and social entrepreneurship initiatives, sponsoring local innovation-related events and competitions, and focusing on empowering beneficiaries to solve their own problems using innovative tools. A role that shouldn’t be forgotten is the crucial contribution that human resources and business excellence teams could make to supporting internal innovators through the enormous initiatives promoted by the organizational innovation and corporate innovation fields.

b.???? Investors

If you still believe that investing in traditional companies is more promising than investing in any innovative startup, then perhaps you haven’t heard of Tesla, the innovative startup in the automotive industry that is worth more than almost all the traditional automotive giants you can think of combined. In addition to that, by investing in innovative entrepreneurs and startups, you could support your country’s innovation ecosystem in a big way. This is obvious now, right? You would surely agree to invest in all profitable innovative startups that have promising products in the market, similar to Tesla. However, the nonobvious decision that could be more impactful would be to invest some in innovative startups that have uncertain success, in other words, early-stage startups. Think of it this way: Investing in startups that are well-established in the market is too late and has a low impact on the ecosystem because investing in them will be costly and it may not affect their survival that much. On the other hand, investing in startups in the ideation phase may sound too early, but it will cost you a little in your pocket and be worth a lot in the ecosystem. You could also make a meaningful contribution to the ecosystem by turning your investment fund, or part of it, into an investment methodology called a startup studio, which would be your factory of innovative startups. Finally, supporting innovative startups isn’t limited to financial investment. You could also enhance their ability to succeed through your valuable mentorship, guidance, and unique network of connections.

c.???? Business and Professional Service Providers

We all know the inspiring stories of the self-made innovative entrepreneurs of the past decade, but the little details that not many know are the valuable support their startups received from people like you and your colleagues behind the scenes during their ups and downs. Let’s be clear: it’s almost impossible for an innovative startup to survive and flourish without hiring external accounting, marketing, or legal specialists as well as receiving consultancy, training, or mentorship from a business or technology expert. That said, there is an opportunity to take these services to the next level to boost the national innovation ecosystem. There are many steps you could take to address innovators’ complaints that current services are not suited to the particular case of their business, that fragmentation within these services hinders their benefits, and that these services are too expensive for their tight early-stage budgets. For example, you could familiarize your team with the world of innovative startups, their latest technologies and business concepts, their challenges and mindsets, and how to design services for them by enrolling in specialized training courses and acquiring relevant professional certifications. This could enable you to design service packages curated for niche clients, such as accounting services for self-driving vehicle businesses or legal services for game development partnerships. Moreover, you could form an alliance with other service providers to collaborate on building a zero-to-hero customer journey for innovative startups. This alliance could be taken to the next level by signing agreements to share the startup’s information across the alliance to provide integrated packages, which could lead to the creation of a virtual business incubator or virtual business accelerator. Regarding the high cost of early-stage startups, you could mitigate this by partnering with a public or nonprofit entity that could pay you a portion of each innovative startup’s bill. In return, if you find a promising startup, you could offer your service packages to it in exchange for a reasonable equity share in the startup, which is a deal some startups are willing to accept. I know that it’s not easy to provide services to innovative startups, but that annoying innovator you’re consulting with now could be the next Elon Musk in the future, and the innovator won’t forget you.

IV- People in the Community

You may think that the big picture of the seed–fruit analogy is complete once you add climate, water, and the farmer. However, this agricultural system needs a foundation, and that foundation is fertile soil. In the innovator’s journey, it would be the innovator’s family and social community.

a.???? Community Leaders

The good news is that your goal is simple: to build a community that supports innovators. The bad news is that the path to getting there is far from straightforward because it depends heavily on the unique characteristics and culture of your community. So, I’m going to give you some recommendations, and you can think about how to implement them properly. There are several initiatives that can be taken to foster innovation in a community and motivate the innovators within it to exist, grow, and speak out. Direct ways include organizing events to raise awareness about innovation, which could be formal, such as conducting lectures and exhibitions and establishing a social club for young innovators, or informal, such as innovation-related carnivals and entertainment shows. Indirect ways could include awarding neighborhoods or families that have more successful innovators and launching competitions to find innovative solutions to some of the community’s problems, such as parking, crime, and car accidents. But what about failing innovators? Crushing their will to try again would have a catastrophic effect on the motivation of many community members to innovate in the first place. Therefore, supporting failing innovators might be more effective than supporting successful ones. Perhaps providing financial and social support to failing innovators and preventing community members from bullying and mocking them could help a lot. Furthermore, spreading the stories of innovators who have achieved booming success after years of miserable failure could also move mindsets in the right direction and indirectly help failing innovators.

b.???? Media Influencers

There is no need to convince you that role models in social and traditional media influence the life choices of society, especially younger ones—you already know that. What I want you to think about is how you can use this power of persuasion to build your innovation nation. Explicitly promoting the importance of innovation may not be the right answer in this day and age, as no one wants to be told what to do or how to think. However, indirect persuasion can do the impossible. To contribute to your innovation nation, you could start by creating content and publishing posts about local innovators, celebrating successes, cheering on failures, and exploring their life stories. As for their innovations, you could promote them and show your audience that you use these innovative products in your life without any problems. You could challenge your audience to innovate, ask them to name the innovations they would like to see in the near future, and show them that the ecosystem has many programs to support them and make their dreams come true. As you can see, the media tactics for showing society that innovators are heroes and innovations are awesome are limitless.

c.???? Family Leaders

It all starts with the family. As a parent, guardian, big brother or sister, or uncle or aunt, you need to know that you may be the first person to come into contact with the potential Edison in your family when their initial spark shines, and you may be the one who directs that spark to turn them into either a glowing torch or dead ash. To turn your home into an innovation-supporting environment, there are several ideas. First of all, to prepare yourself to be a top-notch innovation coach, you could educate yourself about innovation, innovators, and how to grow one. Fortunately, there are several free online resources available in different languages at your fingertip. From these resources, you could learn how to foster a family culture of curiosity, problem-solving, independent decision-making, out-of-the-box thinking, experimentation, celebrating and learning from failure, and teamwork. You could also borrow some smart tactics for developing some essential skills in the young potential innovators in your house, such as role-playing, brainstorming, critical thinking, drawing and building things, and selling them to others for real money. Depending on your budget and the layout of your home, you may want to bring in innovation-related books, videos, games, educational kits, do-it-yourself (DIY) kits, and art supplies and designate a space, if possible, to explore these tools. However, providing your young innovators with these inspiring tools may not be enough. So, you could add a special ingredient to the mix—your time. You could sacrifice some of it to try out the tools with them, tell entertaining stories about great innovators past and present; collaborate on building projects; have weekly brainstorming sessions with them to solve real or imaginary problems; conduct science experiments; run innovation competitions; take field trips to see inspiring places, events, or living role models; or organize a home-made innovative product sale with relatives and friends. You can’t imagine how you could boost innovation at home if you announced little celebrations for every innovative attempt, no matter how small. In my experience, however, these events are the easy part of providing emotional support for your young innovators. The part that’s not easy is ignoring the skeptical looks you get from others when your innovators choose unconventional activities and hobbies and you support them; it’s even harder to stand by their side when they burn the furniture or waste your money because of an unrealistic idea. But you can always remind yourself and others that the stories of great innovators contain a lot of that sort of thing. Finally, even though I have focused here on your supporting younger innovators, doing what you can to help your innovative spouse, older sister, uncle, grandmother, etc. is also crucial for your innovation nation.

V- People Who Innovate

If you were to take a final look at the seed–fruit analogy in your mind, you would point out an embarrassing problem in the final image. Where is the thing that is initiated by the seed, supported by the climate, held by the soil, watered by the farmer, and produces the fruit? The tree, yes, we have forgotten the tree, which is you, the innovator, the center of the innovation system and the core of the innovation process. In an article I published earlier , I discussed why to innovate. In another published article , I talked about the nature of innovative ideas, and in yet another one , I wrote about how to reach them. However, if you’ve made improving the national innovation ecosystem one of your top priorities, then your mission now is not just to innovate but also to maximize your work in terms of quality, quantity, and impact. You can sharpen your mental innovation tools by learning new tricks. For example, in addition to frequently updating your technical knowledge in your field to keep up with new tools and trends, you could master advanced creativity techniques, such as TRIZ or emerging innovation-related methodologies, such as gamification. These steps could boost the quality of your future innovations, especially if you add to them a boundless curiosity to explore topics and problems that are off your usual radar. On the other hand, you could increase the number of innovations you produce using a variety of tactics. For example, if you have been comfortable innovating alone in the past, you could begin exploring working in teams. It might feel as though you are slowing down at first, but once you all get into the right rhythm, your team will be a production line. You could also take full advantage of high-tech digital tools to speed up your innovation-related tasks. With them, you can do in minutes and hours what used to take innovators days and weeks, such as enhanced knowledge mining, advanced data analytics, smart patent research, AI-supported computer-aided design (CAD), virtual simulation and testing, and 3D printing. Furthermore, if you feel that your strength lies in product innovation rather than in commercialization, you don’t have to become an entrepreneur. If you could put your innovations in the safe hands of business experts, then you can focus on coming up with more and more innovations. You could try to sell the intellectual property of your innovations to interested corporations, partner with an interested entrepreneur, hire a business graduate, or contract with a startup studio. If you can’t delegate the commercialization task to others and you still believe in the economic feasibility of your innovations, then starting your own business is still not a bad option. Finally, you could expand your impact as an innovator across the country through initiatives such as motivating other innovators to build on your innovations, training and mentoring potential local innovators, and inspiring students to join you in the world of innovation.

VI- Just Everyday Citizens

If you have no interest in joining innovators to make a difference in the world, and there’s no innovator nearby that you can motivate, then believe it or not, you still have an economic weapon that could steer the market. It’s called buying habits. This weapon could be triggered by convincing a sufficient number of your family members, school friends, friendly neighbors, and social media followers to develop the habit of preferring innovative products and services sold by new brands over traditional ones sold by known brands of known quality. And if the people you know spread the idea of this openness to the people they know, then miracles will happen. What will happen is that the private sector will get a signal from the market that consumers are moving away from traditional products and services and looking for new ones. As a result, companies and investors will fuel the national innovation engine with more money to adapt to these emerging buying habits, which, in turn, will drive the country’s innovative capacity ever higher. Adopting these buying habits by a large part of the population is a challenging goal, but achieving it will always make innovators in demand. So, classifying yourself as an everyday powerless citizen isn’t a valid excuse for not playing a role in building your innovation nation. Check your shopping list again, and choose wisely, my friend, this Black Friday.

VII- Final Thoughts

Back to our question about the leaders of the legendary rankings of the Swiss innovation ecosystem.? I may disappoint you, dear reader, by confessing that I don’t have an exact answer, but there is no agreement among scholars on the category of people who led this success.? However, if you go to Switzerland and visit a part of Geneva called Cologny, you might hear the famous Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, say the words I’ve begun this article with. He insisted that for a nation to be a winner in dealing with innovation and technology trends, its members must participate fully in its national innovation ecosystem, and fully means fully. So, what are your next steps for contributing to your innovation nation?