INNOVATION is a much used yet often misunderstood word.
Innovation requires a willing customer for whom a new invention, product or service is cost effective.
Ironically, science and technology, the source for much innovation, is taught to our children in a way that is separated from its commercial origin.
Steeped in this academic tradition and without a family background in trade, I came late to commerce. Science, for me, was a journey from ignorance and towards the public good.
Nevertheless, I enjoyed matching solutions to problems and inexorably moved towards what was then called Applied Physics, where I luxuriated in the well-funded laboratories of the Scientific Civil Service, working to place our many inventions into the hands of British Industry, where hopefully innovation would occur.
It came as a rude awakening, therefore, when funds were chopped amid Prime Ministerial cries that British science had not striven hard enough to sell its inventions to the world. Ever ready for a challenge, I set to and within five years or so had customers for our science from Asia and North America - but not many from UK and Europe.
Indeed, I would get calls from all over Japan asking for visits and, as relationships grew, even being invited to participate in technology road mapping exercises, planning products for years ahead. But, alas, none from home!
And so I learned that innovation has to become a tradition as powerful and pervasive as our traditions of science and invention.
Back home to build the Science Park, I observed our piece of planet Earth from a new perspective and realised it’s really quite a Goldilocks place. Not too hot, nor too cold to cause us much inconvenience. Neither is it too low lying to risk tidal- inundation nor too high to freeze regularly.
Water is plentiful and yet, despite our moans and groans, the sun shines often enough. Our soils are rich with a volcanic constitution, but the volcanos are long gone so we have no risk of explosion or earthquake. It’s easy to see why early man made a beeline for the place as soon as the last ice age melted away.
Today, though, our bliss is threatened by our tastes for those things we can’t get locally: cars and electronics, exotic foods and other goods that stock our high streets. To pay for them, we have to trade. We have to learn to engage in commerce and that means inevitably to engage in innovation.
And innovation, as I said earlier, has to be considered a tradition – and, as with all traditions, the younger it’s learned, the better it sticks. To help get it started we are beginning our second year of Generation Innovation.
A call has gone out to the principals of all post primary schools asking their school to nominate the sixth former most likely in their view to become an entrepreneurial innovator. (To download a nomination form, please visit: www.nisp.co.uk ).
With the help of Facebook (thanks guys) we’ll invite them to our event in Titanic Belfast on November 20, form them into a club and introduce them to successful innovators and the processes of innovation.
Most importantly of all, we’ll keep in touch with them as they make their way in the world, aiming ultimately to encourage them to return to apply their innovations here and for the benefit of our economy.
That way, we should all be able to enjoy high standards of living and choose our own destiny in our little Goldilocks land.