Innovation Perspectives - Educating Tomorrow's Workforce

This is the tenth of several 'Innovation Perspectives' articles we will publish this week from multiple authors to get different perspectives on 'What product or sector is in desperate need of innovation?'. And to close off the week, here is my perspective on education:

by Braden Kelley


"We need our children to be Masters of Mystery and Einsteins of Insight." - Braden Kelley

When I first saw this topic I wanted to write about education innovation, but I resisted when a couple of the contributing authors chose this topic. I wrote about the publishing industry instead, but then this week I came across a Phil McKinney article and had the opportunity to meet Sir Ken Robinson, and my passions for an education revolution were stirred.

We sit at the nexus of amazing new education technology capabilities, the globalization of work, and an incredible transformation in the needs of employers. The path forward is not the same as the road behind, but our education system is proceeding as if it were.

Instead of pursuing the current education mantra of more, better, faster, we need to instead rethink how we educate our children because we need to prepare them for a different world. A world in which flexibility, adaptibility, creativity, and problem solving will be prized ahead of the deep technical knowledge that is fast becoming a commodity and easily available.

I've said here on Blogging Innovation that the keys to business success are insight and execution. We are ending an era of incredible business focus on execution excellence and are entering an era of an increasing business focus on insight. Excellent execution will always be valued and required, but more and more components of this execution are shifting from the developed world to the lower-wage developing world.

We are currently in a race to the middle when it comes to standard of living as the developing countries like China, India, Brazil and others climb up the pyramid and developed countries like the United States, Italy, Greece and others slide down. Those developing countries wanting to stay near the top of the flattening standard of living pyramid will have to re-tool their education systems to to prepare their populations to grab as big a share as possible of the higher-wage insight-driven jobs.

Here is an interesting chart from a Newsweek-Intel Study reformatted by Phil McKinney:


Looking at the differences in perspectives between the American and Chinese respondents in the research, I came to two possible conclusions:

1. I am Chinese
   
2. The United States (and many other developed countries) are headed in the wrong direction and better change course on education fast

You may think that my views on education are too business-focused, but look even the arts are being globalized (look at Cirque du Soleil).

I believe that we underestimate children's ability to understand the real world and I think that the education system and the business world need each other more than they realize. We need to re-imagine our public-private partnerships and expectations when it comes to education, and we need to start educating today's young kids for tomorrow's world.

The fact is that we are pushing the limits of taking today's understanding of science to improve productivity an standard of living. Going forward we will need to break through currently held physical and natural limits and an expanded understanding of our physical and natural worlds. This will require a new generation of scientists and workers who can synthesize approaches from different cultures and disciplines, that are masters of creative approaches to problem soliving, and that have the entrepreneurial spirit to breakthrough perceived barriers. Are these the kind of students we're eduating?

What kind of students is your country educating?

As an added bonus, if you haven't seen it, I encourage to check out Sir Ken Robinson's video on "Creativity versus Literacy" here:



You can check out all of the 'Innovation Perspectives' articles from the different contributing authors on 'What product or sector is in desperate need of innovation?' by clicking the link in this sentence.

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Braden Kelley is the editor of Blogging Innovation and founder of Business Strategy Innovation, a consultancy focusing on innovation and marketing strategy. Braden is also @innovate on Twitter.

Decreasing Standard of Living, Increasing Profits

We are at an inflection point in the developed world, and the fate of your standard of living rests either in the your own hands (if you are an entrepreneur) or in the wisdom (or lack thereof) of a few key politicians.

The question is will the direction be up or down?

Economic factors in our newly globalized world dictate that individuals in lesser developed countries like China and India will experience rising wages and an increasing standard of living while individuals in the developed world experience flat or declining wages and standard of living in a race to the middle.

This began happening some time ago, but has been buried under a pile of easy credit.

Housing costs have increased, food and fuel prices are surging upwards along with commodity prices as demand grows faster than supply. Meanwhile, real wages are declining. Sounds like a depressing situation, right?

Well, all is not lost. If we can't avoid the inevitable decline in the developed world, then as individuals--and even as states and nation--we can seek to slow its decline or reverse the trend completely.

How do we do this?

As states and nations, we must invest in improving our ability to efficiently provide the basics, while at the same time reducing our demand for scarce commodities.

Our businesses must move from being product-led or even customer-led organizations to maintain their lead by transforming into innovation-led organizations that can move faster than competing organizations overseas with lower costs that seek to copy their innovations.

As individuals we can either go along for the ride as employees and hope that our government and business leaders make these adjustments faster than foreign competition, or help to lead the charge as entrepreneurs.

The entrepreneurs among us must recognize this new reality in the world and identify ways to profit from it. We must uncover the new or amplified business and consumer pains and the solutions to them. These truths will exist across the developed world and thus will scale for entrepreneurs or businesses bold enough to pursue them internationally.

What does this look like you might ask?

Well, one example would be satisfying the need for consumers to increasingly downgrade from restaurants to other types of less-expensive prepared foods when time is scarce. UK supermarkets like Tesco and their ready meals offer a great example that could be replicated in fast-paced American cities like New York, Seattle, and San Francisco.

Another would be exporting used American SUVs to take advantage of their rapid repreciation in the era of $4 gasoline to places that benefit from the weak dollar and/or lower fuel prices.

There are a million more ideas and innovations out there for people to find and put to work even as developed economies crest.

So are you going to let this new wave pummel you or are you going to find a way to ride it?

That answer is up to you...