Innovation is Social

In my last post here I said we need a "politics of green innovation," but I said little about what that means or how to get there. My friend Rohit Gupta called me on that point: what is a politics of innovation? This question has resonance with another conversation I had later the same day, with Mark Tovey, author of the book Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.

I had been thinking about our need for innovative technologies, and I think the creation and evolution of those technologies will depend less on corporate or academic R&D and more on grassroots ideation and incubation. They will emerge from many conversations among many smart people in a context of more and more open innovation, and for this to happen we have to create structures for participation that are open but facilitated.

In my conversation with Mark, we were discussing the difficulties in scaling democracy, getting from conversation to decision, and managing discussions that are not echo chambers, where people who profoundly disagree listen - really listen - to each other and try to understand opposing perspectives without dismissing them. One question we didn't discuss, but it's implicit, is how do you find and promote innovative thinking in a world where there are billions of people and potentially millions of conversations?

In the post about politics of innovation, I was thinking about what you might call large-P Politics – what world leaders are doing and saying and how the right kind of leadership at that level might facilitate technology innovation as well as social innovation.

But a real politics of innovation will depend not only on the Obama Administration, the United Nations, and other leaders in the world. It will be crowdsourced, and it depends on an orchestration of voices and facilitation of ideas from all corners of the world. Beyond governments, corporations, academia, and other institutions we need, and we can expect, effective grassroots knowledge-gathering and -sharing enabled by social technology. And we'll need mechanisms for bubbling up the best thinking from the grassroots.

Why do I think grassroots innovation is both possible and important? I suggested in a post at my own blog that some of the smartest thinking in the world might be off radar, because great thinking doesn't necessarily get great attention. We're emerging from a broadcast world where a very few minds were prominent, and those were filtered by skill in clearing media hurdles. While it's a common complaint that with more people publishing, there's more trivial, mundane, worthless content appearing, in my world that's not what I notice. Signal may be low relative to noise, but what I've noticed is how many smart voices have appeared that would never have been exposed in the broadcast world.

Aggregating and facilitating these voices is the politics part of the politics of innovation. Capturing the best thinking and making it actionable is the innovation part. What I'm looking for here is meta-innovation, or innovative ways to innovate. And it's critically urgent issues like global warming that can drive this kind of innovation.

Let's start here – leave your thoughts about the politics of innovation in comments below.