UK innovation and creativity report

In my essay on innovation and creativity policy (UK leads; US lags), I mentioned that Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown commissioned a study by the British Design Council on the link between creativity/design and business. That Review of Creativity in Business was released early last month. Nicknamed the Cox Review, after Sir George Cox, chairman the British Design Council who headed up the study, the recommendations from the study are expected to show up in the next government budget submission to Parliament. According to Business Week - "Renewing Britain's Legacy of Innovation", one recommendation is moving ahead quickly:

. . .a program to encourage businesses and design students to think and work together. The government is now helping to set up higher-education centers to create pilot courses that combine business, engineering, technology, and creative disciplines in a similar way to Finland's International Design Business Management program or the new Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University in the U.S.

So, where are the US programs? Where are the programs to replicate the Stanford D-School?

Sadly, the answer is that the US is still fighting the last war. We are focused on innovation as S&T - not innovation as creativity.

The Cox Review uses the following definitions:

'Creativity' is the generation of new ideas - either new ways of looking at existing problems, or of seeing new opportunities, perhaps by exploiting emerging technologies or changes in markets.

'Innovation' is the successful exploitation of new ideas. It is the process that carries them through to new products, new services, new ways of running the business or even new ways of doing business.

'Design' is what links creativity and innovation. It shapes ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users or customers. Design may be described as creativity deployed to a specific end.

Technology is part of those definitions - but only part.

With the Cox Review, the UK has at least conceptually made the leap from looking at a technology-led economy to an innovation & creativity-led economy

We need to do the same.