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GAME PLAN: Part hard-headed business guru and part touchy-feely idealist, Dr Kao, 57, feels that Singapore could go into areas like alternative energy and elder-care technologies - which are 'emerging horizons of opportunity'. -- ST PHOTO: ALAN LIM
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WITH a grin and a flourish, innovation expert John Kao hands you a cheery orange booklet, the size of a business card, titled John Kao's Innovation Manifesto.
'It's my version of Mao's Little Red Book,'' jokes the chatty San Francisco-based consultant who has criss-crossed the globe to advise individuals, businesses and countries - including Singapore - how to think out of the box.
For Dr Kao, a Chinese-American who holds a PhD in psychiatry and spent 14 years lecturing on creativity and entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, innovation is not just a buzzword of today's wired, fast-paced world. It is something that can be analysed and strategised.
His clients have included United States Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Coca-Cola, Nokia and the governments of Singapore and Ireland.
Innovation Nation, his latest book, was chosen by BusinessWeek magazine as one of the 10 best books of last year.
An entrepreneur as well as a film and theatre producer, the 57-year-old was in town this month to give a talk at the Civil Service College.
So what is innovation?
As his diverse resume suggests, Dr Kao believes innovation cannot be sliced and diced into specific areas of knowledge, but is inter-disciplinary in nature.
This genre-busting, big-picture approach to innovation is captured in the first few lines of his 2,500-word Innovation Manifesto, which he gives to business contacts.
'Why is innovation necessary? Because everything is changing.'
Innovation enables people to 'adapt to the waves of disruptive change', including 'new business models, demographic and geopolitical shifts (and) new and emerging technologies'.
However, he writes, 'to realise innovation, efficiency must share the stage with creativity, control with nurture, facts with gut feel, logic with passion'.
All of which nicely sums up the life of a man who has dabbled in medical and multimedia business ventures, authored his first book on business creativity, Jamming, in the late 1990s and even produced in 1989 an acclaimed Hollywood movie, Sex, Lies And Videotape.
America's innovation crisis
WHILE innovation is a non-linear and sometimes fuzzy concept, Dr Kao firmly believes it can be institutionalised in a systematic way by companies and governments.
He says a national innovation agenda involves joining the dots between 'science and technology, education, funding and leadership'.
In his tome Innovation Nation, he writes that the United States' lack of a 'national innovation strategy' is going to cost it its present pole position in the global innovation race.
What is needed, he argues, is a game plan to tackle such worrying trends as fewer computer science graduates, low levels of math literacy, less-than-friendly immigration policies on foreign talent and the exodus of US venture capital to China and India.
One influential American who has thought a good deal about this problem is Senator Clinton. He tells The Straits Times she would make a 'great innovation president'.
Dr Kao and Mrs Clinton met in 2004 in a US Defence Department advisory group on creative thinking. She has consulted him on innovation issues, The New York Times reported last year.
To further systematise thinking about a nation's innovative capabilities, he espouses studying 'best practices' from around the world.
He cites, for example, Finland's plan to merge three top universities in design, technology and business into an Innovation University, calling it a best practice for 'high-level, multi-disciplinary education'.
The tendency to equate innovation with just science and technology is 'a mistake', he says, as design and the arts do play a part in how people see and experience the world.
The final piece of the innovation puzzle is to determine 'what's the big idea', and this is what Singapore as an emerging innovation centre needs to work towards, says Dr Kao.
He speaks from a familiarity with the country's government service, dating back to the early 1990s when the Economic Development Board sought his advice on how to become a media hub.
Opportunities for Singapore
WHAT the city state needs is a 'common innovation agenda' linking government departments, businesses and schools, he says.
Science and education need to be seen 'not just as ends in themselves' but for how they can 'serve world-changing objectives'.
'I think the goal of being an innovation-driven country isn't just to generate more wealth for Singapore,' he says, pointing to the role that Singapore's fairly sophisticated R&D base can play in solving global problems like environmental degradation.
'Singapore has earned the respect of the global community and I think there are lots of things Singapore can do that are more outward-looking.'
This includes going into areas like alternative energy and elder-care technologies. He calls them 'emerging horizons of opportunity' for Singapore, given the global hand-wringing over climate change and ageing populations.
Part hard-headed business guru and part touchy-feely idealist, Dr Kao's outlook stems from his family background.
'I think I chose well as far as parents are concerned,' he quips. His father was a medical doctor and his mother, a classical musician. Both migrated to the US from China.
Dr Kao's homemaker wife has a background as an entrepreneur and is also creatively attuned. 'She knows a lot about health and cuisine and fashion,' he says.
He himself is a proficient jazz pianist. The father of three plays every day at home in San Francisco, calling it 'food for the soul'.
Apart from music, another thread running through his life is the need for 'white space', or time alone to think.
For that reason, he sometimes disconnects the phone in his office, and relishes the long flights to places like Singapore, 'because sitting on the aeroplane is kind of like white space for me, to come up with ideas on behalf of the people I work with'.
In Innovation Nation, he lauds Singapore's policies to woo talent and build cutting-edge research facilities in biotechnology and new media.
Singapore is 'testament to the notion that a nation doesn't have to be big to be a leading competitor in the global innovation race', he raves in his book.
He cites Intel chairman Craig Barrett as saying that a computer chip-making facility in Singapore is worth a billion dollars more over 10 years than the same facility in the US, 'largely because of favourable tax policies' here.
While the country is not short of infrastructure and talent, it has yet to develop globally visible brands and companies, says Dr Kao.
'I think that Singapore companies have often competed based on their mastery of efficiency and logistics and (through) partnerships and alliances, rather than (being) driven by innovation.'
Simply perfecting business models does no good when certain lines of business 'are going to disappear' because of technological advances, he warns.
One general example is the book publishing industry, says the man for whom the concept of voice mail is already dead. He has them converted into zippy mobile text messages using the latest voice recognition technology.
'There's going to be quite a bit of creative destruction, and Singapore's not going to be immune to that,' he warns.
clare@sph.com.sg
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