Stories of Innovation for the Millennial Generation: The Lynceus Long View

The Lynceus Long View

P. Formica

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137350084
• eBook ISBN: 9781137347312
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Strategy
• Index: Business

The potential of storytelling as a research tool for enhancing the understanding of knowledge creation, acquisition and conversion into innovation and innovative business activities is the methodological underpinning of this book's narrative approach. The subtitle comes from Lynceus, one of the Argonauts who accompanied Jason to Colchis in his quest to find the Golden Fleece, who was said to have excellent sight. Among the various interpretations of the meaning of the Fleece, one version highlights the importance of discovery to innovation by voyaging to 'terrae incognitae' (unknown lands). This book is a narrative of a fictional voyage to the 'terra incognita' of Innoland the island of innovation and other mental travels that make sense of events and actions which spur innovation.Stories of Innovation for the Millennial Generation is written for Millennials willing to assimilate and grow dynamic, innovation-driven capabilities which lead to the creation of high-impact startups.

The Stories

3

Self-Portrait with Thoughts of a Millennial, Youthful Knowledge Nomad

Formica, Piero. Stories of Innovation for the Millennial Generation: The Lynceus Long View. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137347312.

At the end of a lecture tour at Beihang University School of Management in Beijing, one of the students, a young man from the West, handed me a pen portrait of himself, complete with his thoughts on the Millennial Generation. This is what he wrote.

I am a knowledge worker, one of those people who leave universities and research centres to enter the entrepreneurial world where fertile ground is to be found in intangibles.

I am a young well-educated European with lengthy and varied experience of studying and I have worked in many countries where companies are, from the start, designed to be international. I belong to online communities with no physical or cultural boundaries. Each day I set up and take part in virtual and face-to-face meetings in Internet cafés. I have learned the lessons on knowledge of Jkujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi as set out in The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. Therefore, I do not limit my learning to explicit knowledge of the kind that concerns official, codified rules as presented in books and manuals: explicit knowledge is formal and systematic, expressed in words and numbers. Instead, and thanks to my encounters with people very different from myself, I am able to acquire and use tacit knowledge – that mixture of intuitions, perceptions and impressions obtained through the use of metaphors, images and experiences. It is subjective knowledge, not easily perceived or expressed; it resides at a level below awareness and is thus difficult to communicate. I have taken up the challenge, putting on the mental attire of the nomad of knowledge.

In the eighteenth century, Naples was a crossroads of European cultural currents and was an obligatory destination on the Grand Tour for the talented and/or wealthy individuals of the time. It was there that abbot Ferdinando Galiani, an Italian economist, said that value consisted of relationships between people. He had in mind economic value, and more: no less important are the ethical, moral and social values fostered through those relationships. In our present times, on the Grand Tour of the World, in which globalization has – above all – accelerated the international movement of students and neo-entrepreneurs, value is created by the connections woven by globetrotting talent: knowledge nomads, or ‘New Argonauts’ as they have been termed by AnnaLee Saxenian.

I am a New Argonaut. I was born in 1986, and I started navigating the international waters of entrepreneurship on board the YEAM, the Young European Avant-garde Minds, a vessel launched in 2006 by a creative European of the Millennial Generation, the Italian-born Nicola Farronato. He was searching for innovative entrepreneurial opportunities at the intersections of business, art and social networks. Since then I have broken down barriers and crossed geographical and cultural boundaries to create value, forming relationships from California to China. Those who preceded me took part, in China, in the long march towards modernity of the Middle Kingdom. Along the way the entrepreneurial troops of the Western world could be seen transferring their manufacturing activities to China. Thereafter, major multinational corporations set up laboratories and research centres there and in India, supported by substantial amounts of venture capital. That is why they are now able to draw from the Asian cultural mix of brains and know-how: technical, in India for the most part, and commercial, in China in particular.

Among my Asian contemporaries are brilliant minds immersed in the circulation of talent. They no longer need to abandon their country for long periods, or indeed forever. Chinese and Indian Millennials plan a stay in the West of no more than five years, compared to the twenty years of their parents. The Indian government encourages this behaviour by conceding dual citizenship to those on the move who travel to America or Europe to learn research techniques. They then return to their native country to transform the know-how they have acquired into ambitious commercial applications. The new oriental shores lapped by the waves of the ‘sea of talents’ are to be found in: Bangalore, Pune and Hyderabad in India; Chongqing and Zhongguancun in China; and Incheon and Daejeon in South Korea. Then there are the cosmopolitan cities of Mumbai, Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul.

The Western world must come to terms with the geography of innovative entrepreneurship. The era of the draining of talent from oriental lands is gone and I feel I belong to an age characterized by multidirectional movements. Large Western enterprises are setting up research centres and laboratories in India, China and South Korea to meet the needs of the rapidly evolving middle classes equipped with greater purchasing power. And we, youthful Western talent, journey to oriental shores to mix with our Indian, Chinese and South Korean contemporaries.

The location of research and development is more important than decisions concerning the localization of manufacturing activities. At Intel, people say it was relatively simple to choose where to establish a production facility; the real skill lay in choosing where to plant the tree of research. Everything depends on the available talent, a more important factor than consumers and government policies. To navigate the innovation currents on the ‘sea of talents’, agile fleets are needed, of large globally integrated enterprises and small global enterprises for transporting intangible goods. No less important is the movement, to and fro, of knowledge nomads between the various key locations of innovation which, in developing countries alone, depend upon some 400 million members of the global middle-class, and, according to the World Bank, this number is expected to increase to 1.2 billion by 2030.

I am part of the innovation caravan that has started to travel the Silk Road once more. It seems that the rediscovery of the Road occurred, after a century-and–a-half of neglect, when the North China Herald published an article entitled ‘Notes on the Silk Trade in Shanghai’. Once, long camel and pack-pony caravans set off from Loyang in the north of China, crossing the arid high plains of central Asia towards Iran, Southern Russia and the Middle East. Nowadays, the Silk Road is a network of ‘streets of dialogue’ whose foundations are in the literature and history of previous great voyages. In the seventeenth century, the Chinese writer Wen Zhenheng published his Treaty on Superfluous Things, a text on cultural consumption and good taste. Centuries before that, Marco Polo travelled the Silk Road and reached the China of the Mongol Emperor Khubilai Khan. This was the fabulous Cathay, epitome of wealth and power, which presented the West with a vision of such a revolutionary world that Marco Polo was accused of being an imposter by his contemporaries. It was centuries after Marco Polo, in 1877, that the German geographer and explorer Ferdinand von Richthofen invented the expression ‘the Silk Road’. These days, it is we, the knowledge nomads, who trigger a process that conveys lifestyles, values, goods and services from one culture to another. Some 150 years ago the Cuban historian Fernando Ortiz described this process as ‘transcultural’: we now refer to it as globalization, of which the legendary traveller of the Silk Road, Marco Polo, was a pioneer.

I have seen the Road reopened and adapted to the era of globalization. The new Silk Road will strengthen ties between China and the republics of Central Asia. Together with China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan will be able to weave a dense, articulated fabric from petroleum and natural gas, using the renewed Silk Road as the commercial shuttle. The Chinese authorities want to encourage the flow of innovative projects to and from their country along this Road, acknowledging and accepting the ‘5 Rs’ (recycling, reuse, reduction, restoration and rethinking) of natural resources, with the objective of widespread sustainable development across the whole of Central Asia. Other knowledge nomads will move through these projects: young Chinese and Central Asians who see the emerging opportunities to create sustainable businesses as the means of realizing their professional aspirations. Multiple visas for different destinations will encourage new ventures, including tourism along the Silk Road. Commercial exchanges and the flow of talent will increasingly go hand-in-hand. I have decided to keep a careful watch on what happens on and to the Silk Road in its role as the rediscovered path to competitiveness.

For this reason I have chosen Beijing as my home. I have done so because I want to contribute to the success of innovative and entrepreneurial Millennials in China. For a West capable of coming to terms with the changes taking place throughout Asia and becoming a complementary player in the process, such individuals do not, I believe, represent a threat. Being complementary means understanding that we in the West will not be able to retain for ourselves the intellectual power and the management of research and business while relegating the tasks of production and manufacture to developing countries. We are entering an era of transnational communities in which the ‘knowledge of others’ will help West and East to understand each other and dance together thanks to physical, social and digital mobility. Innovation will act as a magnet, attracting one to the other. The interweaving of knowledge and its organization in entrepreneurial and social networks, which transcend geographical, cultural, religious and ethnic barriers, will help us learn how to exploit differences, creating advantages for everyone. Difference, after all, is the key to capitalism.

4

An Italian Millennial Fleeing His Country

Formica, Piero. Stories of Innovation for the Millennial Generation: The Lynceus Long View. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137347312.

Monastic schools sowed the seeds of the medieval university and Italy was at the forefront of that development: the Alma Mater Studiorum of Bologna was its cradle of higher education. Centuries later, the Prussian Wilhelm von Humboldt created the modern university where the new physical and natural sciences were mastered alongside the classics. In the 1950s Peter Drucker introduced the concept of managerial science, thereby bestowing upon us the business school. At the dawn of the twenty-first century a new academic structure began to take shape, in which scientific discoveries existed in symbiosis with high-growth enterprises. My country, Italy, adhering to the Humboldtian ideal of a university, was extremely slow to embrace managerial schools and it continues to lack truly entrepreneurial universities. This inadequacy forced me to leave my native country and I now find myself in Ireland, a nation bursting with entrepreneurial energy, where I participate in an experimental laboratory of start-ups with high expectations and strong potential for growth. This is where innovative entrepreneurs are moulded: this is what I dream of becoming.

David in the land of Goliath

I feel as if I am David in the land of a new Goliath, a giant marble statue sculpted by monopolists and corporations, hybrids of the political and economic systems and protected by public funding. They take many forms, such as public transport, public utilities, the large-scale retail trade and companies that govern the nerve centres of everyday life, from trade fairs to air transport.

I, David, am the child of parents who dreamed of becoming entrepreneurs and who were eager to find a way to harvest the fruit hanging from the trees of the great orchard of innovation. Now that I am an adult, I am trying to transform their dreams into reality.

But Goliath is threatening, casting a shadow of tyranny that seeks to stifle new entrepreneurial ideas and innovations that would erode the boundaries of the status quo. Hiding in the shadows are the few heroes of revolutionary entrepreneurism, riding on the waves of innovation – from digital technologies to life science – that are changing everyday life.

Goliath’s creators obstruct innovation and stifle competition. Those monopolies and corporations do not supply the financial, entrepreneurial or managerial resources needed to increase the birth rate of new knowledge enterprises, to reduce the infant mortality of those founded in the wild or even to fuel the growth of those that survive.

What would encourage me would be to meet people who are more interested in the opportunities innovation offers than the dangers it poses, for opportunities that are exploited prevent an otherwise irreversible decline. But the shadow of Goliath obscures opportunity. Goliath is my problem.

Forced flight

Enterprises such as Westinghouse and General Electric strengthened the American higher education infrastructure with the introduction of management culture and practice, helping individual universities to achieve worldwide academic excellence. In Italy the university world has largely failed to react, ignoring or reacting with hostility to the words and works of enlightened entrepreneurs like Adriano Olivetti. This is a severe handic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introducing the Stories
• The Stories
• Stories from the Sea of Crises
• 17  Innovation in the Academic World: A New Mission for University Old Stars
• 18  a Dialogue between Start-Up Entrepreneurs Crusoe and Gulliver: Gulliver Teaches Crusoe the Physics of Entrepreneurship
• 19  The Spiders Webs of Mr F and Mr M
• 20  The Red Thread of Coffee
• 21  Subterranean Currents: Trade Relations between the Middle Kingdom and Arabia Felix in the Digital Age
• 22  An Interview with Maison Dubais Style Director
• 23  Letter to the Millennial Students of Tartu University
• Epilogue: Learning How Events Not Supposed to Happen, Happen
• Selected Bibliography