Today’s conference at Washington University, called the Innovation Exchange, brought together top scholars and business leaders to think collaboratively about fostering innovation.  It was hosted by our new Institute for Innovation and Growth.  Keynote speakers included:

Bill Peck (former Dean of Washington U. Medical School and founder of Innovate St. Louis)

Carliss Baldwin (Professor at Harvard Business School and an expert in the relations between design and the economy)

Christoph Loch (Professor of Corporate Innovation at INSEAD, possibly the best business school in Europe)

Jeff DeGraff (Dean of Innovation at the Competing Values Company and a professor at University of Michigan)

Key insights that emerged included:

* The need to transform business school education to teach for innovation

* The desire for managers and innovation champions to have a forum where they can exchange problems, issues, and solutions

* The need for managers and staff to be educated about how innovative companies work, and how they can make their own organizations more innovative

Watch this blog in the coming year, as this new Institute for Innovation begins to take shape.

I spent a few days last week in Oklahoma City, as a keynote speaker for an event sponsored by the Creative Oklahoma initiative. Believe it or not, but Oklahoma is working hard to become known as the “state of creativity” (and they’ve gotten a good start by securing the domain name www.stateofcreativity.com). Like many of my readers, I was at first skeptical; Oklahoma doesn’t typically come to mind in connection with the creative economy. But Oklahoma’s creativity initiative has the backing of top political and business leaders, a rare combination. I met the Governor as well as a substantial number of local business leaders. And both Democrats and Republicans were united behind the initiative.

For about five years now, Oklahoma’s initiative has been guided by Sir Ken Robinson, a leader in the field of creativity and education who has spent most of his life in the U.K. (thus accounting for his knighthood by the Queen) and, seven years ago, attracted to the U.S. by a top position at the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles. No doubt as a result of this expert advise, Oklahoma is doing everything right–the campaign is proceeding on multiple fronts, including education, culture, and business.

I was invited to talk about innovation in the schools of the future. Oklahoma schools have adopted the A+ schools model that originated in North Carolina. If we want a creative economy, then we absolutely have to start with our schools, because the creative economy depends on creative workers. I haven’t written much on this blog about my research on schools and creativity, but let me just say that most schools today do a very poor job of fostering creativity in students. When I see Oklahoma investing in its schools in this way, I begin to believe that it truly could become known as the “state of creativity.”

They’ll have to be in it for the long haul; regional transformations like this historically have taken between ten and twenty years. Another invited speaker was Pascal Cools, of the Flanders District of Creativity project. Flanders is the Flemish region of Belgium, and until a few years ago was thought of as an agrarian backwater. Now it’s a center of the global innovation economy. In the small Belgium town of Leuven, Pascal coordinates a global network of “districts of creativity” that include Qindao, China, Karnatka, India, Catalonia (”in” Spain although the Catalonians would deny that), and yes, Oklahoma–the only state in the U.S. to be a member in this international effort.

I wish Oklahoma great success in this transformative effort.

This last week, I visited the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a United Nations agency based in Geneva. I was the lead-off speaker of a two-day conference called “Intellectual property and the creative industries.” By “creative industries” they mean money-making ventures based in the creative process: the primary topics of discussion were movies, music, and videogames. There were speakers on the program who represented each of those industries, and the ministers of culture from Lebanon, Jamaica, and Nigeria.

The creative industries make a big impact on the bottom line: in the average OECD country, between 5 and 6 percent of GDP comes from the creative industries. The United States is far ahead of the pack: over 11 percent of U.S. GDP comes from the creative industries. (And we’re just about the only country without a ministry of culture!)

Our stereotype of creative activity is the starving artist, painting in the basement; or the depressed poet, writing somewhere out in the woods. But the forms of creativity that make a big economic impact are complex, organized, and collaborative–think Hollywood movies or major new videogame releases: a single new movie or videogame involves hundreds of people and costs $20 million dollars plus. In spite of the high cost, these investments can pay off big: Halo 3, the new videogame for Microsoft’s XBox, made over $300 million in its first few weeks. The studio music recording industry is also complex and collaborative; it starts with a song, but then enters a multi-staged collaborative process (brilliantly demonstrated at this conference through a documentary video displayed by Ms. Laura Tesoriero, President, EPSA Music, Buenos Aires).

A few things were missing from the conference. Most of the speakers were advocates for rightsholders, and for mechanisms to protect against copying and piracy, such as Digital Rights Management (DRM). But there are strong voices out there arguing for “free culture” and “creative commons”; developing countries who argue that protected pharmaceuticals cost too much and that they are morally justified in producing copies, because they save lives; such voices were not present at this conference, and the result was that it felt like we were all preaching to the choir. When I presented my argument for mandatory licensing and for a cap on licensing fees (you can find it at the end of my book Group Genius), I felt like I was upsetting the consensus–even though I’m a big supporter of intellectual property rights.

A second thing missing was those industries based on patents rather than copyrights; most of the talks clearly assumed the copyright as the model for IP. But many people would argue that software, for example, is a creative industry, and patents are more relevant than copyrights in that industry.

And, finally, those traditionally high status creative activities like painting, poetry, and novel writing were not represented. It’s perhaps to be expected that national governments would focus on the highest-revenue industries. But publishing is not an insignificant business; many books generate millions, and a large number of successful movies are based in novels. And the art world is often the source for new trends in graphic design and packaging. While focusing on the big-money industries, we shouldn’t lose sight of the full range of creative activities–all of them are critical components of culture.

(I’ve just been invited to be a guest blogger on orgtheory.wordpress.com; this post also appears there.) 

Are creativity and innovation different in different societies? This is a hot topic, particularly in fast-growing Asian countries including China and Korea. China’s leaders, for example, don’t want to be the low-cost commodity provider forever; their ambition is to become as innovative as the United States is today. China and Korea were the first places where I sold foreign translation rights to my new book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration. My message in that book is that creativity always comes from collaboration, not from solo individuals.

There’s plenty of research suggesting that Asian societies should be better at collaboration. Many anthropologists group the world’s societies into “individualistic” and “collectivistic” cultures. In individualistic cultures, each person is thought to be independent, and to have a unique set of internally driven personality traits that make them different from everyone else. In contrast, collectivistic cultures think of people as deeply interdependent with their group. Asian cultures tend to fall at the collectivistic extreme, and the United States tends to fall at the individualistic extreme. So the puzzle is: How could the United States be so innovative, if all innovation in fact comes from groups and collaboration? Shouldn’t Asian societies be better at fostering group genius?

I started thinking about this again last week, when I read a 2006 article by Jack A. Goncalo and Barry M. Staw called “Individualism-collectivism and group creativity.” The paper reports on an experiment with 68 groups of college students. Half of them were primed with a task that would later encourage them to behave more individualistically; the other half did a different task that brought out the collectivistic side of their nature. Then the groups did a classic brainstorming task, and the creativity of all the group’s ideas were judged by an independent panel.

The results: the individualistic groups were significantly more creative than the collectivistic groups. They generated more ideas overall, and more ideas that were judged to be highly creative. Goncalo and Staw explain this by citing a range of previous studies, for example those showing that people often conform to the majority view emerging from the group, even when they know it’s wrong; and that dissent and argumentation causes groups to solve problems more effectively.

In my book, just like Goncalo and Staw, I note the potential weaknesses of groups–conformity pressures that all too often lead to “groupthink.” And I also describe the research showing that too much cohesion makes groups less effective. I hope that their article finds a receptive audience among Asian readers. But in the U.S., our companies need a different message, because maximum innovation emerges when you have a difficult-to-find balance of individualistic and collectivistic values. If everyone is being selfish and stubborn–highly individualistic, in other words–then that tends to make groups less creative, and to make companies less innovative. Many U.S. companies still foster a culture that goes too far to the individualistic extreme. The recent emphasis on teams and collaboration is just what these companies need.

The wrong message to take away from Goncalo and Staw’s research is that the U.S. will always be more innovative than collectivistic, Asian cultures. Optimum innovation will emerge from companies that fall somewhere in between; and we’re all still working hard to discover what that ideal organizational culture looks like.

I’ve just come from giving an invited talk to the “Exploring Innovation” conference, hosted by the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank. Andy Hargadon was also a speaker at the event, and it was great to hear him talk again and to have some time to catch up with him. The audience represented community development experts from around the country, all interested in making their activities and their organizations more innovative. I always learn a lot from the insightful questions that come from audiences after my talk, and this event was no different. Because my talk emphasized the power of collaboration and of group genius, many people wanted to know “What should I do if I’m dealing with an extremely uncreative group?” Examples given included city councils and city governments. My talk also emphasized the importance of connection and cross-fertilization, which led several people to ask “What should I do if my region is balkanized, with each locale focused solely on what’s best for them?” These are great, tough questions, and I have no easy answer for these folks. The real answer is that innovation isn’t likely to emerge until these deep seated structural features are changed, so that regional networks start to look more like the types of networks that generate substantial innovation. No single person can make this happen; it will take a concerted, long-term, broad change to regional culture and ways of doing business.