So we’re especially pleased to announce our first artist-driven innovation project, We the People, in collaboration with Santa Fe artist Sydney Cooper and leading Santa Fe design studio Anagram. Click through to the Project Description to learn more, and join the project crowd-funding effort on United States Artists.

“Jugaad is a remote sibling of the Western-style hacking, the manipulation of existing products and services, and with the Chinese Shanzhai phenomenon (innovation through fast imitation) it has in common the utter disrespect for any kind of brand or management ideology. Adaptation, improvisation, rapid experimentation, fast failing, a high tolerance for ambiguity, super-flexibility… together these principles are perhaps marking the beginning of a new era of doing business, a new economy.”

It’s enough to make you think that innovation is a case of emergent behavior in a complex system (which to some extent it is), beyond influence. But I would also argue that there is room for adding structure, context, and what I’ll call method (as opposed to a process) to accelerate and diffuse innovation. As one example, SFIP’s method, based on its overall problem-solving approach, features five main themes:

1. Pick the right problem
2. Engage the implementors
3. Invite multiple perspectives
4. Provide the best environment
5. Experiment radically and recursively

In practice, these work roughly as follows:

Wrong Problem/Bad Solution: Altogether too often, organizations or stakeholders fail to identify the actual or underlying systemic problem at hand, and instead wind up addressing symptomatic or proximate issues. The SFIP method begins with a deep and robust re-examination of the nature of the problem, featuring a whole systems approach.

Stakeholders as Participants: The “client,” or the entity experiencing a given problem, becomes an active participant, working with SFIP and the collaborative team. This should include end-users in a user-centered design process. Implementation is part of the deliverable, and implementors are part of the team.

Diversity Trumps Ability: Scott Page, Ph.D. (External Faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute) has formally proven that in the type of problems SFIP will address, there is greater value to having a diverse set of problem solving perspectives and heuristics, than homogenous depth of expertise. This is also known as “two heads are better than one.”

Skunkworks Work: There is abundant evidence to support the idea that when truly new thinking is needed, a new environment, context, and organizational values are required. SFIP offers a conceptual “safe haven” for participants to abandon legacy assumptions and organizational cultures, and to truly “think different” about the problem at hand.

Obvious Connections/Unexpected Combinations: Given the nature of our problems in such areas as energy, climate, education, health, water resources, sustainable development, and biodiversity, it’s obvious that industry, policy, and science must be brought into closer collaboration; the role of art, design, and creative processes may be somewhat less obvious, but in the words of Albert Einstein, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” SFIP promotes unexpected interactions across all these sectors, thus favoring serendipity.

Fail Early and Often: SFIP uses rapid virtual and physical prototyping, and advanced simulation, visualization, and modeling (a Santa Fe-area specialty). This allows collaborators to experiment broadly, wildly, and frequently, permitting the generation of many more potentially interesting ideas, their full evaluation, and reiterative and recursive feedback loops for improvement.

I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to see many of these concepts “emerging” out of Jugaad, and other spontaneous approaches. Let’s all do our part to make the world safe – and even supportive — for wrong-headed innovators, everywhere. We have nothing to lose but our silos.

The National Science Board’s biennial Science & Engineering Indicators suggests that as early as the 2012 edition, the U.S. will no longer lead the world in total R&D expenditures – unless corrective action is taken (graph here). And Senator Jeff Bingaman, who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, recently told a Senate hearing that  “…our investments in new energy technologies, and the science underlying them, have been surprisingly deficient over the last 20 years….  our national R&D investments in medicine and biotechnology, as a percentage of sales, are about 40 times greater than our research and development investments in energy.”

These weaknesses in the R&D base are being compounded by ineffective commercialization pathways. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke recently announced the creation of the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy, with a focus on accelerating commercialization, saying the process as it stands is “broken.”

All of this is critically important for our national innovation capacity, and thus our competitive position. But in citing Germany and China (not coincidentally the world’s two largest exporters) and their  R&D and manufacturing prowess, Obama overlooked what may be our strongest domestic competitive asset: creative innovation, beyond science, technology, engineering, and even product design (all areas in which China is on track to excel, as articulated by Martin Jacques in his masterful When China Rules the World).

Here, we find leadership in the European Union. EUROPA, the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009, aimed “…to raise awareness of the importance of creativity and innovation for personal, social and economic development; to disseminate good practices; to stimulate education and research, and to promote policy debate on related issues.” A stellar group called the European Ambassadors for Creativity and Innovation, representing the arts, sciences, social, and policy sectors, has issued a Manifesto stating in part: “The world is moving to a new rhythm. To be at the forefront of this new world, Europe needs to become more creative and innovative.” And the European Institute of Innovation &  Technology is envisioned as “…a key driver of sustainable European growth and competitiveness through the stimulation of world-leading innovations with a positive impact on economy and society.”

This is a classic whole-systems problem, on a truly global scale, and one that demands a comprehensive and holistic solution: R&D, education, commercialization, creativity, design, innovation. It’s a big strategy, but one that’s needed to win first place.

Bruce Nussbaum from Business Week completed a tour of Asia, impressed everywhere he visited with the attention being paid to design as a critical innovation element at all levels (including national policy), leading to what he called “Designomics” in his speech to the Design Korea 2009 International Conference: “The global economy is emerging from the Great Recession… with a very different shape, a very different trajectory and a very different set of growth engines.  Design, with a capital “D” is also emerging from the recent crisis, with a very different form and function. A design-based business model and a design-based economy provide the best new opportunities for creating value, growth, revenues, profits, jobs and wealth for the decades ahead.”

A new book entitled When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, by Martin Jacques, is profound, serious, and convincing (and, if that’s not scary enough, according to Nussbaum China gets innovation and design). Meanwhile, down under, Australia’s Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (check that title again, it’s important) has published Powering Ideas: An Innovation Agenda for the 21st Century(pdf here): “Tough times demand creative solutions…. Innovation is not an abstraction. Nor is it an end in itself. It is how we make a better Australia, and contribute to making a better world — a prosperous, fair and decent world, in which everyone has the chance of a fulfilling life.” Well said, Minister Carr.

There are themes emerging from these voices, even if the melody is not yet clear. We at SFIP greet the challenges of a new year, a new decade, and a new era reaffirmed in our intention to support the development of a genuine, forward looking, national innovation strategy; and we greet the attendant opportunities with the initial efforts of the Santa Fe Innovation Park as a national innovation center, pioneering this strategy’s design and implementation.

Happy New Year.

As the entire “design for social change” movement gathers momentum and matures, we hope to see more organizational infrastructure emerge (and this is an area of keen interest to SFIP). One of the outcomes of the Aspen event was a proposal for New Design, a soft structure linking interested design firms to philanthropic funders and  social challenges, which may be a step in the right direction. As one summit participant oberserved: “…there’s only so much you can accomplish in three days….” What if this was one part of an “Appropriate Solutions Laboratory” @ SFIP?

HOK, one of the world’s largest architectural firms… formed an exclusive alliance with the Biomimicry Guild, a Montana-based consulting organization that pairs consulting biologists with designers, seating architects and ecologists together at the drawing table.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/09/architecture-imitates-life

Check out the RISD blog post HERE