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Innovation vital for today's economy
Posted: 18.05.2007
Industrialist and business thinker Sir George Cox made a renewed plea for the UK to grasp the value of innovation in an address to the Cambridge University Land Society (CULS).
Sir George, currently chairman of the Design Council, but better known for his distinguished career in the technology and engineering industries and at the Institute of Directors told the CULS Global Economy Forum, headed by Cyril Leonard Senior Partner Douglas Blausten, that ability to innovate had never been more important.
The world was being reshaped by different forces and the pure economic growth being seen across the globe was having an enormous overall effect.
Sir George was the recent author of the Treasury inspired Cox Review on Creativity in Business, which set out the steps that the Government and the business, broadcasting and education sectors should take to ensure that UK businesses harness the world-class creative talents that the UK possesses.
He stressed that major attitudes in society were changing all the time ? 911 had brought about huge changes in attitudes on aircraft security for instance. Yet our ability to see where technology was leading was ?pretty poor?.
?We misunderstand it all the time,? he stressed. Nobody had expected mobile texting to be a big market and most inventors didn?t know where their inventions would lead them. Alexander Graham Bell was working on a device for hearing impaired children when he invented the telephone.
Few predicted the way the internet would develop or that one major application would be auctions of the type created by eBay.
Sir George said it was ?ridiculous? to suggest that the 3rd World should take low skilled jobs while the developed world took high skilled. There was nothing to suggest that places such as China, India or Brazil should just be seen as a source of cheap labour. There was likewise no one area that could be said to be the natural preserve of the developed world.
There was ?very little? that government could do to drive innovation, he said. The public sector?s inability to innovate was ?appalling?. Public sector procurement ought to drive innovation but it didn?t.
It was terribly difficult to sell innovative solutions into the public sector, he suggested. Yet if the public sector did demand innovative solutions the same solutions could be sold around the world. |
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Douglas Blausten of Cyril Leonard and Sir George Cox head of the Design Council at a May 2007 CULS meeting
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