Citizen-centered innovation is the way for Canada to rebalance its innovation ecosystem

By David Watters

David Watters is a former Assistant Deputy Minister for Economic Development and Corporate Finance in the Department of Finance, the founder and former CEO of the Global Advantage Consulting Group, and the founder and current President of the not-for-profit Institute for Collaborative Innovation. This op-ed first appeared here in The Hill Times.

Innovation is a human activity carried out to produce a novel good, service or process that achieves a valued purpose from its use in society. This op-ed is intended to stimulate a discussion about the need for a different approach to innovation called “citizen-centered innovation.”

Citizen-centered innovation means designing and implementing innovation programs to satisfy human needs. That is, to satisfy our needs as customers, patients, students, consumers, employees, taxpayers and citizens.

This approach would reverse the polarity of innovation flows, from currently placing a priority on the “supply” or production of innovation, to a new emphasis on the citizen-centered “demand” for innovation. In doing so, it would give priority to the social context supporting innovation, in addition to its technology base.

While innovation does require an understanding of the natural world and how to develop a particular device, its application goes well beyond producing a technology to include designing and building the conditions for a society to understand, accept, adopt and use that technology to meet human needs. In short, it requires a “social contract” from that society.

For example, as a technology is adopted widely - such as in the case of the automobile – it can begin to transform other parts of a society. In the automobile’s case, it included facilitating the growth of suburbs and shopping malls, permitting access to jobs, supporting the growth of new industries – such as auto repair, gasoline filling stations, insurance – making leisure travel and entertainment more accessible, and facilitating commerce, but also producing accidents, pollution and traffic congestion.

As technologies are introduced into an economy, these broader societal implications and likely changes in behaviour need to be anticipated and understood. They are part of the innovation process.

To illustrate this system complexity, let’s consider one example. Thomas Edison is renowned for his discovery of a thing – the electric light bulb. But this bulb was the last component of an entirely new electric lighting industry he designed to replace the kerosene-based lighting industry.

Instead of just asking how he could solve the technical problem of inventing a long-lasting light bulb, Edison considered the broader question of how he could get consumers to switch from kerosene to electricity. As a result, he designed a fully operational system. His technical platform included generators, meters, transmission lines and substations, and he mapped out both how they would interact technically and how they would combine in a profitable business.

But an innovative business model wasn’t enough to bring this revolutionary technological system to market. Edison also needed to test it out in a friendly pilot market, and he needed support to negotiate with the lamplighters’ union. Accordingly, for his first trial, he chose Lower Manhattan, which was filled with influential Wall Street financial firms eager to support and fund novel technologies, and whose employees worked long into the night.

Edison needed a broad array of societal knowledge – and not just a knowledge of high-resistance filaments for his light bulb – in order to replace the kerosene lighting industry with the electric lighting industry. In other words, for innovation to be successful, we need to understand and design integrated systems of both technical and social knowledge.

Such a change in emphasis would acknowledge and put into practice the view that technology is simply a tool intended to serve humanity. It would place less emphasis on innovating things and more emphasis on innovating social outcomes – in better healthcare, affordable housing, equitable social services, sustainable energy and transportation, safe communities, a cleaner environment and inclusive economic growth. In short, it would provide a framework of meaning and purpose, to encourage public support and investment in innovation activity to benefit all Canadian citizens.

By recognizing that technology is not an end in itself but rather only a means to assist in satisfying citizen needs, we can begin to rebalance Canada’s innovation ecosystem from a dominant focus on producing individual things from individual firms, to a broader focus on investing in and producing collective results for all citizens. Let’s try it.

The Institute for Collaborative Innovation (ICI Canada) has initiated the Canada Innovates Project, led by Robert Walker and Dan Wayner, to pursue this path to citizen-centered innovation. Should this different approach to innovation be of interest, please join us.

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