Irving Wladowsky-Berger

Innovation and Diversity

October / November 06 By: Irving Wladowsky-Berger Volume 4 Number 5

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Innovation occurs when invention and insight intersect, when someone takes a brilliant piece of technology and sees for the first time how it can be applied in a new way. That process of innovation transforms institutions, enterprises, even society as a whole.

Innovation generates new industries and new markets. It can even inaugurate entirely new epochs in human history. Even now, the industrial age is giving way to an information-based society founded on ever more sophisticated information technologies, integrated by the internet into a global infrastructure available to the most inventive and adventurous minds in the world.

The internet has changed the very nature of innovation, permitting it to occur more and more at the intersection of multiple disciplines, and of business, government and academia. Scientists and engineers now collaborate across continents and oceans in real time, sharing knowledge, data and insights and cutting innovation cycles dramatically.

Connected, they can bring more intelligence and insight, more imagination and intuition to bear on the most complex problems known to science and business, and deliver the innovation that moves society along the path of progress.

In short, innovation—€”once the solitary pursuit of genius—€”has become a collaborative enterprise, understandably, since the types of problems we must address these days are too complex for one or two or three people, or a whole lab, or even the resources of an entire company.

Collaborative innovation is arising not simply because the technology is available. It is emerging from the elemental human need for community. Scientific research has grown more and more to be a community effort of shared work and insights. Indeed, that was and remains among the primary functions of the internet. But now the internet has scaled the walls of the research lab and has enlarged the internet community to embrace hundreds of millions of people around the globe, people with different languages, cultures and values, people who see things from different points of view. And all of them captivated by the opportunity to collaborate on the myriad challenges of the information-based society.

This is community on a cosmic scale. It is the potential for hundreds of millions of human interactions and an almost infinite number of opportunities to innovate on everything from new technologies to solving the toughest problems in life sciences and physics. It is community that grows daily as more and more people join the workforce of an increasingly interconnected world economy. Just look at Brazil, China, India and Eastern Europe today.

That global panoply of cultures and ethnicities, languages and mores can be summed up in a word—€”diversity. Diversity is about the importance of having many different elements in the mix, many different experiences, many different perspectives, many different skills.

Collaboratively or individually, it is people who innovate, and every business and country needs to attract the best and brightest to compete in the increasingly fierce world we inhabit. But, the best and brightest come with all kinds of characteristics—€”from gender, nationality and religion to color and sexual orientation. It would be downright foolish for a business to deprive itself of really good people because those people do not feel welcome in that company's environment.

It would be equally foolish for the United States to allow the emergence of a national climate inhospitable to diversity. As commerce becomes more global and nations more interdependent, our diverse, multicultural society with many different views and skills represented is a major advantage for the U.S. and for U.S. businesses that share this culture, an ace in the hole, so to speak, for the U.S. and U.S. businesses.

Could it be that we are in the process of sacrificing our ace by making it much harder for talented people to come here to study and work? It was natural for the U.S. to become more vigilant after the 9/11 terror attacks and continuing security threats around the world. But I worry that our open, multicultural society is under attack from within and that visa problems encountered by professionals and students may be symptomatic of an increasing populist nationalism—€”a kind of "go it alone" isolationist culture.

Through history we have seen that it is hard for a country to become or remain an innovation leader if it closes itself off from the world. An insular China invented myriad technologies, from printing to the compass. But it was an adventurous, extroverted Europe that innovated on them, gaining knowledge, wealth and power. The U.S. seems almost to be at a crossroads between openness and insularity if one listens to powerful figures in the media and politics engaged in the current immigration debate.

We have been at these crossroads before, most notably in the 1920s and 1930s. The United States turned inward away from engagement with the world politically, culturally and economically with rejection of the League of Nations, the National Origins Act of 1924 and the Smoot Hawley Tariff. This turn inward led to the Great Depression and probably contributed to the onset of World War II.

Will the U.S. continue to be an innovation leader into the 21st century? There is ample reason for optimism. A fast-changing world requires flexibility and adaptability, both of which are underlying strengths of America. But we must resist the temptation to turn inward. We have gone through other nationalist, isolationist periods in the past, which eventually we corrected. I am confident that we will do so again because our society is deeply grounded in democratic institutions and free-market principles.

We need to remind ourselves that, since America's founding, our culture has grown in diversity and openness, assimilating and benefiting from many different cultures without at the same time obliterating them. Experts generally agree that diversity—€”of perspective, ideas, information, thinking, etc.—€”is an essential element for innovation to flourish. And America's deep-seated diversity has been one of the key factors that made us an innovation leader. Those qualities will be even more important as the global competition for innovation leadership intensifies.

Irving Wladowsky-Berger is vice president, technical strategy and innovation, at the IBM Corporation.