The importance of innovation and collaboration

In today’s world competition is King, and the concepts of neoliberal Economics have enforced this throughout every fibre of our society.

Since the financial crisis of 2008 many people have questioned whether competition is the best way to solve the global challenges of our time or maybe collaboration is the King in waiting. We have witnessed this recently with the collaboration of science across the global to produce a vaccine quicker than anytime in human history.

How can other industries learn from this, and this the biggest lesson that we can learn from the Pandemic?

• Innovation is the process by which we solve human problems and our grand challenges.
• The marketplaces are where consumers can purchase that mature innovation to improve the quality of their lives and the prosperity of us all.
• Consumer demand is the mechanism by which the best innovations are selected, and as a society we become more prosperous.
• As we become more prosperous our problems and the solutions become more complex and more diverse.
• This complexity inherently requires more skills and capability more technology and more investment in innovation.
• Innovation is accelerating quicker than ever before.

By creating a marketplace within the institutions that are creating innovation, charging people for access to education, and limiting collaboration, capitalism is harming its own blood supply. Therefore, if the lifeblood of capitalism is innovation then why do we put so little time, effort and resources into innovating?

It takes a real crisis before we appreciate that innovation is essential, investment becomes bottomless, collaboration is king, whilst competition relegated to the bench and politicians are still trying to find their playbooks.