Innovation can save us. Some native ingenuity could be useful. But why is innovation slow in coming, even though Sri Lankans are not entirely devoid of business savvy?
There is not much innovation because internet-based enterprises suffer from formula fatigue. Most startups begin from a very formulaic location.
Why so? How would you expect the young startup hopeful to be innovative, when his or her education has been formulaic all along?
How can any of us expect the young entrepreneurs to break the mould when the mould is what turned them out?
They didn’t break the mould but were its’ creatures, and merely stepping out of a straitjacket, doesn’t equip them to break the original mould.
So perhaps we have our formulaic education system to thank for our rather prosaic startup milieu. We trained our children to conform in school, when it comes to exams, and even when it comes to sport and extra-curricular activities. Each time they showed they are good at conforming, we cheered them on.
Now, we expect them to innovate on demand. It won’t happen. Their mindsets are anything but innovative, and they are afraid not to conform — a sure sign that they are averse to transformation, and are scared stiff of risk, to boot.
AIMLESSLY
There are countries such as Germany where they sell apartments as a service and not as real estate. They have put down containers and improvised them as residential units where they provide cleaning services and other utilities as and when these containers are occupied by renters.
That’s innovation making maximum use of internet-aided connectivity and location-specific marketing.
These business solutions are not just innovative, they also challenge existing regulations. If a country is regulated to the teeth, there is no way business solutions such as the German example above, can succeed.
But when it comes to regulations, we have been formulaic there too. This country is over-regulated, and that’s encouraged by the fact that governments regularly pamper those in Government service. When there is a formidable Government service that exists at least partly because the ‘Government quota’ provides jobs for supporters, regulation becomes a sine qua non.
Government servants don’t do much except lay down regulations. If Government servants exist, they mostly do to lay down the rules. What else can they do? Move files around aimlessly because they don’t have any other productive work?
To put it in simpler terms, where there are Government servants, there have to be regulations, because that’s the only way to keep the bulk of them occupied. This may sound exaggerated or contrived, but that’s the culture of Government service.
If there are no regulations, Government servants would invent some, because that would justify their existence. So much regulation is formulaic, and would spawn a response of instant rebellion, you’d think.
But the education system has not produced those who can push the envelope, and challenge systemic over-regulation of the aforementioned sort. On the contrary, those who are educated to respect the formula would be comfortable in an over-regulated business environment.
Perhaps, it would not be an exaggeration to say that they would seek an over-regulated business environment because they like that type of formulaic work that involves engaging over-regulated systems. It gives them a sense of being anchored because that’s what they were used to from the time they were in school, where they were brought up to respect and even adore formulaic structures.
TECHNOLOGIES
It’s therefore simply rather optimistic to expect children that were encouraged not to ask questions and never to rock the boat, to become sudden champions of innovation. It’s as if they are being asked to jump out of their skins.
Innovation is also the art of dreaming. However, dreaming is associated with sloth, and other negative attributes in our educational milieu. Students who dream are quickly labelled as slow-learners and uncooperative disruptors.
But yet, to innovate is to disrupt. It’s the disruptive innovations such as ride-sharing apps and driver-less cars that have caused massive tectonic level upheavals in existing systems, and upended conventional business practices.
These new innovations cannot thrive in an overly regulated environment and they would have been stopped on their tracks, if people didn’t seek to disrupt the existing systems of orderliness.
But there were no Government servants and policymakers in the countries that unleashed these disruptive technologies to reign in the new systems. They allowed the new disruptive technologies to trump the regulations.
But our mindsets aren’t used to disrupting regulations, because our students and youth in general have been brought up in a culture of worship for regulation and order from the time they were kindergartners. For example, we still by and large pay by cash or card for products and services whereas digital payment systems are becoming the norm even in some neighbouring South Asian nations.
The domestic startup culture has also become overly expectation-oriented. Those such as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak disrupted the then big-tech environment dominated by IBM by working from their garages and “pulling all-nighters.”
Now, in this country they expect choldren to leave school, come with their devices to shared office spaces, and work with charts and graphs and produce carefully crafted proposals to qualify for funds doled out by venture capitalists.
This is to expect innovators to innovate on demand, and nobody innovates on demand. Innovations come from unregulated environments in which people thrive in taking risks.
But our educational system has also made our school leavers and other innovators in their productive years extremely risk-averse.
DESIGNATED
Risk-taking has been frowned upon as being reckless and wasteful, and both the parental and the teacher-driven wisdom has been for children to plan, and to follow the conventional path to be able to succeed in life.
They have been encouraged — forced is a still better word — to join the herd. If there are risk-taking students with a rebellious streak, they have been quickly branded as loafers and losers and all but hounded from their peer groups, which are also heavily regulated by adults, or at least driven by adult expectations.
This culture of conformism has produced intellectual cretins. They are embarrassed to be asked ‘why are you different?’ when they should be proud to be told ‘you are different.’
But Sri Lankan society has become extremely comfortable with the culture of conformism, that its never questioned.
But after all this, there is puzzlement that there isn’t enough innovation driving the economy. But asking for innovation in a culture of conformism is like hoping milk would flow from a soda fountain.
Young people are told they are being watched while they sit down and innovate. For starters, innovators don’t function ideally when they are watched, and when they are cosy sitting down in designated comfort-zones.
They innovate when they are free to think, and are sure they are not being watched or monitored, be it by venture capitalists or policymakers. But policymakers have got used to thinking that there can be production-line innovation, just as there are production line examination results.
Lastly, the inspiration to innovate does not come from within the confines of laboratories or classrooms. Those who are inclined to innovate should follow their dreams, or at least their own inner guiding light, however nebulous that concept may be. They should be able to buck the system and to this end those who drop-out and turn their backs on the system should not be considered write-offs. The major innovators who developed the big name technologies of today such as Steve Jobbs and Mark Zuckerburg are mostly college dropouts.
Back here, dropouts would be called names and not given any funding because they have failed to conform to the ideals of a mostly failed education system.
In all, it’s an extremely bad recipe for innovation. In sum, on the contrary, it’s a recipe to make sure people don’t innovate. It’s a recipe to ensure that the dreamers are dropped, and the ideas-men hounded out.
