Hope: The Ultimate Political Renewable
Hope: The Ultimate Political Renewable
A socioeconomic force without equal, hope is the ultimate political renewable.
Key Takeaways
There are plenty of positive examples of transformative large scale infrastructure investment.
One of the keys is making hope real for citizens. The modern reality is that the scale and transformative power of hope do not entirely rest on one-off multibillion dollar big bets.
Unleashing hope often means harnessing people’s innovation skills; innovation ecosystems democratize access and can change lives for the better.
Innovation ecosystems are highly dependent upon the surrounding built environment. The local built environment is itself a specialized ecosystem which feeds talent and resources into the innovation ecosystem, potentially yielding unique, long term, competitive advantages.
What lies at the heart of political decision-making? Hope.
Hope that a given policy will work. Hope that the party will gain or stay in power. As a simple heuristic for a party’s platform: ‘We offer hope, they do not.” But day-to-day maneuvering is dwarfed by the biggest hope of them all and the one political reputations are made of: truly harnessing the hope of the people. Make hope real and citizens (voters!) unleash energy, creativity and shared vision at a scale and transformative power no piece of legislation or narrowly-won election can hope to muster. Hope is the ultimate political renewable, a socioeconomic force multiplier without equal.
This does happen, and it does happen at scale. Silicon Valley is an obvious one, Tel Aviv another. Bangalore has become the IT and startup hub of India and a player on the world stage. India’s DMIC (Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor) features the construction of eight smart cities between its leading megacities. Erbil, in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, is undergoing an economic transformation with the Erbil Citadel as its centrepiece.
More controversially, every two years, alternating between summer and winter games, host nations race to complete large scale infrastructure projects promised, as part of their winning pitch, to the International Olympic Committee. Almost without fail, hope is central to politicians’ pitch to the public: railway networks and stadia to produce years of construction work, topped off with a leviathan month-long boom in tourism. The big hope, however, is that upgraded public infrastructure catalyzes long-term, self-sustaining regional economic development. This is controversial, of course, because Olympic hopes and ideals often transform into Olympian levels of debt with infrastructure delivering much less value than promised.
Big Bet Versus Wide Net
The modern reality is that the scale and transformative power of hope do not entirely rest on one-off multibillion dollar big bets. Hope also emerges at a more granular, more local level that is collectively equally if not more consequential. And the political playing field is wide open at precisely the moment in time when the realities of digital technology dramatically expand the available set of infrastructure ideas and strategies. Large scale, self-sustaining socioeconomic development is now equipped with an entirely new, transformative strategy. Hope can be networked.
The global cooperative response to Covid-19 is a marvellous example. Imagine such a plague without digital transformation. We’d still be working on vaccines, life would not yet have returned to normal, the death toll likely much greater. Yet even the astonishing success of vaccine labs to veins in less than a year understates what is happening, nor is the scope limited to media favourites like artificial intelligence and the internet of things (IoT). Digital transformation is everything and everywhere, a system far more than the sum of its parts, encompassing the strategic and the operational, processes and products, and from small town inventors to global marketplaces.
Socioeconomic Teraforming
Armed with this immeasurably important economic force, and with the imperative of fully and fairly harnessing hope, it follows that infrastructure policy, strategy and implementation considers not only how to employ digital transformation but how to create it: local socioeconomic specialization and adaptation is now an unlocked mega-opportunity, one that effortlessly scales regionally and nationally even in this early phase of Industry 4.0.
Transforming every community, worldwide, into its own innovation ecosystem transcends “mega:” it is nothing short of socioeconomic tera-forming. Embedded in this vision are the concepts of local adaptation and economic complexity, wherein innovation ecosystems evolve based upon their particular skills, resources, and resulting interactions. This evolution is accelerated (1) via the strategic, operational and financial flexibility to fully and fairly maximize local opportunities; (2) networking with human, physical and digital resources, regionally, nationally and globally, maximizing each locale’s innovation capacity and probability of becoming self-sustaining, while minimizing the cost and time to do so.
This approach is as practical as it is ambitious. Practical because it is based on empirical data which has proven predictive, including measures of economic structure, market dynamics, strategic and growth opportunities. Practical also in the form of existing infrastructure (universities, research parks, libraries, research innovation organizations), which together comprise part of the innovation solution. And practical because research, development and commercialization processes increasingly employ techniques (agile, modelling) and resources (cloud computing, IoT) found in the economically complex nations that are demonstrably able to generate wave after wave of national innovation.
Ambitious because of the vast amount of work ahead:
Nations further down the ECI face both a daunting challenge and an unprecedented opportunity. A major byproduct of economic complexity is geographic concentration of the skills, know-how, and infrastructure which create ideal conditions for self-sustaining innovation ecosystems. This competitive reality only exacerbates the disparity between regions and among nations. The opportunity is hope-fueled practicality: seeding nascent innovation ecosystems with critical technologies (AI, 3D-printing, cloud computing), attracting skilled locals, and supporting them with leading innovation management practices, thereby creating many of the ideal conditions required for less complex economies to potentially bypass entire stages of infrastructure and development. Objectives to aim for include strategic innovation ecosystem frameworks designed to promote rapid adaption to local conditions; adaptation increasing local innovation capacity; planning for and cultivating interaction effects; and increasing the probabilities of positive innovation outcomes via shared physical and digital infrastructure with the surrounding areas. Democratizing inventiveness in this way unlocks hope in the way a faraway stadium cannot. (Again, this is not to present megaprojects and socioeconomic tera-forming as competing choices. They are not.)
Innovation Ecosystems: Creating the Ideal Conditions for Life
The Goldilocks zone has long been a compelling metaphor explaining why life on earth exists: Earth is not so far from the sun as to be a frozen ball, nor so close as to be molten. Earth’s location provides for liquid water and a protective, breathable atmosphere: ‘just right’ for life as we know it to evolve. The planet’s 23.5 degree tilt results in seasons to which life on earth has adapted. These adaptations vary depending upon where a given species finds itself. Polar bears and pandas, for instance: each is perfectly adapted to the complexities of its environment, neither would survive in the other’s habitat.
Modern innovation ecosystems borrow so strongly from this metaphor that an enormous amount of research has been conducted to measure and determine the effects of accelerating technology evolution and regional socioeconomic responses. It is becoming common to think about innovation ecosystems as complex adaptive systems. This perspective makes it more clear why familiar inputs like labour, cloud computing, smart devices, research facilities and local infrastructure yield such different outcomes when introduced into different innovation ecosystems. Understanding why this happens is a key part of transforming hope into reality: When the conditions of innovation life are present – and so many communities are potential innovation Goldilocks zones – and the better we understand how to help innovation ecosystems thrive, the more opportunity is unlocked and with a greater probability of success.
Built Environment 3D Chess
This is why it is crucial to note that an innovation ecosystem doesn’t exist in a vacuum; as with any ecosystem it is dependent upon the surrounding environment. For example, “the quality of a region’s infrastructure – i.e., public transportation, education system – may play an essential role in supporting its entrepreneurial ecosystem.” This point was also stressed by every innovation ecosystem administrator interviewed by The Groundbreakers for this post: from upgrading the local airport to the proximity to other research institutions to observing “this is the 3-dimensional chess of why infrastructure is critical to economic growth and societal operations.”
Hope is universal. Hope wedded to well-managed, well-equipped innovation ecosystems offers a practical route to socioeconomic tera-forming: the upgrading of social and economic outcomes at inspiring, life-changing scale. The timing could not be better given the ubiquity of digital transformation, replicable examples of economic complexity, and people’s boundless capacity to build, all within self-sustaining, locally adapted innovation ecosystems that rely upon and contribute to existing research and innovation infrastructure. Hope is the ultimate political renewable, a socioeconomic force multiplier without equal – waiting to be set free in communities worldwide.