The cry is that we “innovate” our way out of the Covid lows. But not the old “creative destruction” model, please
As the vaccine bites and some steps towards “normality” become imaginable, we must (as one of our blogs earlier this week suggests) try not to just restore the status quo. One part of that would be our belief that certain kinds of innovation will pull our societies and economies up - creating new markets, new resources, new possibilities.
But here are two pieces which ask whether we have to value different kinds of innovation now - more planet and community friendly, less “creatively destructive” and “rip it up and starting again”.
Firstly from the Green peer in the House of Lords, Natalie Bennett, a piece from The Ecologist on “ecological innovation”:
Everyone’s talking “green” now as part of the “build back better” agenda. There’s a great deal of emphasis on “innovation”, “skills” and “productivity”.
That was the focus of a parliamentary roundtable I attended with the London School of Economics and Politics focused on “sustainable growth” for the so-called levelling up agenda, chaired by Professor Tony Travers.
But I found in the presentations and much of the discussion a curiously old-fashioned idea of what innovation is and what skills we need. It was the same kind of 20th-century mindset that I found in a widely shared Telegraph article by William Hague tackling the same issues.
Ecological
The former Conservative leader and many of the contributors at LSE equated innovation with industrial, chemical and civil engineering. It involves making lots of high-tech stuff, to be less carbon-emitting, and, maybe, less planet-damaging, than the “stuff” we have now.
This is an agenda for business-as-usual with added technology. It is still treating the planet as a mine, even if the occasional nod to the circular economy makes it sound somewhat less as a dumping ground.
I suggested that we consider innovation more broadly. That could start with including ecology as a focus of innovation.
There’s plenty of evidence of the need for such an approach in the Dasgupta Review. This showed that natural capital per person had declined by almost 40 percent from 1992 to 2014.
I pointed to examples of ecological innovation, such as the wonderful Wakelyns organic agroforestry hub in Suffolk and the hugely productive Ferme du Bec Hellouin in Normandy.
Impact
These are spectacular innovators in agroecology, producing healthy food in large quantities from small areas while having great social and natural impacts.
But I could also have pointed to increasing management of road verges and other public spaces for wild fauna and flora, and projects to help parents feed small children more healthily.
All of those fit with David Burkus’s definition of innovation as “application of ideas that are novel and useful”- and they're good for people and planet too.
Also clearly fitting in with Burkus's definition are social and economic innovations. This might include the Universal Basic Income that could transform the way people work, study and live. It would include 15-minute cities that could free up people’s time to use more productively than commuting.
The LSE panel spent a great deal of time talking about in the age of Covid-19 in particular, and the need to create jobs. The four-day working week as standard with no loss of pay is an innovation that could also have a massive impact there.
Stuff
We also talked with the LSE about productivity. The concept here was also stuck in the 20th century, with the focus always implicitly and often explicitly stuck on increasing GDP.
This is despite what Professor Dasgupta in his Treasury-commissioned report had to say about the need to change our measures of progress.
“Productivity” as currently envisaged all too often means producing poverty, inequality and environmental destruction.
Many questions were not asked: What are things being made for? Is this labour tackling inequality making our lives better?
Most politicians and thought leaders are, it seems, still fixated on making more “stuff”.
Power
When it came to talking about skills, again the focus was all on engineering, on construction, on making things.
Now I do not deny that the UK has a desperate shortage of those skills. Those needs are well known. But we also have a desperate shortage of other skills: in the caring and medical professions, in community organising, in town planning that truly understands active transport needs.
When the “skills agenda” is in view, those are not in the foreground. They’re often not in the picture at all.
Our current systems have delivered an unhealthy society and a broken planet. We need an approach that is far more innovative than business-as-usual with added technology.
And “levelling up” is entirely the wrong frame to put this all in. It suggests “lifting” the rest of the country to something like life in the London and the South East pre-Covid, when that was nothing to aspire to, and certainly not “green”.
The second take on the kind of innovation post-Covid needs comes from the veteran UK guru of innovation and creativity, Charles Leadbeater, on Medium:
…The pandemic has propelled radical innovation which may yet outlive the crisis such as the inspirational way that societies such as Pakistan and Bangladesh have improvised welfare safety nets to dispense micro payments to tens of millions of people using the mobile phone infrastructure. The crisis could provide the spur to create new kinds of welfare states in societies with combined populations of almost half a billion.
…Mariana Mazzucato’s new book, Mission Economy, is the most cogent account yet of how governments can create the conditions in which public and private, entrepreneurs and social activists, civic leaders and investors, can be brought together to enact system wide changes.
Disruptive innovation, driven by venture capital and technology, with the goal of creating stock market unicorns, has been in the ascendant since the publication of Clayton Christensen’s landmark book in 1997. We are witnessing a shift towards more systemic innovation resting on public and private collaboration to achieve big social missions.
…Liberal democracies have to embrace more democratic innovation to encourage more deliberation, participation, direct involvement in decision making at all levels, so that citizens have more opportunities to directly engage with one another and those in power. Democracy only thrives when more power is entrusted in and generated by more people: that’s why David Runciman has proposed a further lowering of the voting age to enfranchise young people.
As Ivor Crewe pointed out, adversarial systems organised around near constant campaigning are no good at deliberating complex long term questions which require a mix of political, expert and citizen intelligence.
…Breakdown creates the conditions for breakthrough; when we fall apart it is an opportunity to come together. As the Pope argued in an article for The New York Times: “This is a moment to dream big, to rethink our priorities, what we value, what we want and what we seek and to commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed.”
Coming out of the pandemic, a sweeping reordering of our economic, social and political systems is possible. It could be a critical juncture which opens up a much wider range of possibilities. The pandemic has shone a light on why fundamental change is needed and also shown in which direction we should head in. Most of the ideas needed are already lying around, waiting to be picked up.
In the pandemic, proposals once decried as maverick have been put into mainstream practice: they work. The pandemic has been dreadful. By the end millions will have died. And yet it has also reminded us of our collective agency to create social change.
We cannot go back to normal, even if we crave the familiar pleasures of eating out, mingling and travelling. Too many people have already suffered radical reversals through illness, unemployment, loss of learning and poverty. Going back to normal will mean accepting the false securities of the old rules.