Innovation Tunnelling
Singapore has an innovation problem it doesn’t yet fully recognise, and that is the dominance of the engineering mindset here. It’s a theme I’ll explore more fully in a subsequent article, but for now it’s enough to notice that while engineers can be brilliant problem solvers, they can only address innovation in limited ways: as clearly defined problems, stable enough and specifiable enough to be able to plot routes towards a solution. And measurable enough to know whether you got there successfully. The result is an unambitious view of innovation as improvement rather than radical adaptation. A study we conducted early this year found that two thirds of managers here see innovation as a matter for incremental improvements rather than radically new ideas.
Posted by edgar on 20/12/02 at 06:28 PM | Categories: Innovation | Permalink