Innovation is alive and well
Published 3:51 pm Tuesday, December 27, 2011
In a recent column published in USA Today, Katrina Trinko, a writer for National Review Online, poses this question: “Is narcissism killing U.S. innovation?”
(Hmmm. It takes a fair amount of … something, narcissism perhaps … to criticize others for their supposed lack innovation when one is employed … as a writer. We empathize with the concept of struggling to come up with a topic; but harping on those who actually do things in any given field for not being innovative enough seems a tad ironic.)
Trinko writes that today’s youth, what with their high self-esteem and parents who encourage them, are too content with their wonderful selves to ever be innovative; they have “no incentive to strive for genuine excellence, or even recognize that it can exist.”
Wow. That’s quite an indictment of several generations, the members of whom are apparently all the same. (According to the column, the “self-esteem movement” began in the 1980s.)
The column argues that “technological progress” has fallen short in many domains. Since the advancement of electricity in the home, not much has truly “transformed” our lives, say those who criticize the unproductive innovators.
Trinko mentions the late Steve Jobs as a true innovator. He was driven not by praise, but by passion for his products, she writes. But here her argument, if there is one, falls apart. Jobs, of course, was an innovator; but he was also described as a … narcissist. Why assume innovation and narcissism are mutually exclusive?
Trinko concludes that as a society we need to have … patience. A good conclusion, but at odds with a column fretting about why there isn’t more innovation now.
At a time when discoveries in science, medicine and technology are routine, in a good, amazing, mind-boggling way, what we need to guard against is our expectations about what “innovation” means in our lives. We need to guard against taking our authentic, creative thinkers for granted, or bizarrely assuming that we don’t have any.
It would warm Trinko’s heart to visit classrooms across the country, from preschool to grad school. She could start with Arlington High School’s NeoBots robotics club, whose work has gained Microsoft’s attention, as reported Tuesday.
“It’s not all about just running a robot,” Dan Radion, 17, the club president, said. “We want to change the world.”
Notice he said change the world, not rule it.
Trinko writes: “If we’re going to snap out of our sterile, stagnant nationwide intellectual mind-set, we need to ‘think different,’ as Apple’s former slogan urged.”
She is encouraged to do just that.
