2021: A Year in Innovation and Skills Reading
/Despite supply chain issues in the book publishing industry in 2021, I managed to get my hands on a number of good books. I know I should shift from physical to digital books when I can, but tangible books offer me a refuge from a professional and personal life overwhelmed by online interactions. They prompt me to slow down and reflect in ways that digital sources don’t. A few books I read this past year had a deeper impact on my thinking about innovation, technology and/or skills than others – sometimes extending, sometimes challenging my understanding. All of them are worth your time.
Innovation in Real Places: Strategies for Prosperity in an Unforgiving World by my Innovation Policy Lab colleague and friend, Dan Breznitz, should be required reading for everyone working on innovation policy. The book upsets conventional thinking about the Silicon Valley model that many jurisdictions try to emulate while ignoring their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Offering a nuanced account of four distinct stages of innovation – and a compelling takedown of venture capital as a valuable measure of capacity and success – Breznitz encourages us to think carefully about the specific strengths our regions have, and how to build profitable niches within fragmented global value chains.
The Boston Review recently published an edited collection, Public Purpose: Industrial Policy’s Comeback and Government’s Role in Shared Prosperity, that includes an essay based on the book, seven thoughtful commentaries and critiques from others, and a reply from Breznitz. A nice companion if you want to read what others think.
Sarah Giest’s short book, The Capacity to Innovate: Cluster Policy and Management in the Biotech Sector, is notable for a number of reasons but captured my attention mainly for its emphasis on the idea of “absorptive capacity” – i.e., the ability of firms to use knowledge to innovate and grow. There’s a familiar refrain in Canadian innovation policy circles: While we have world-leading educational attainment and world-class research, we struggle with commercialization, scale-up, and growth. Giest’s work offers a useful framework for understanding what is (and isn’t) happening on the knowledge use side of innovation, and offers recommendations about how to build collaborative and absorptive capacity in innovation ecosystems.
What happens when ordinary people lose their jobs? In American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears, Farah Stockman offers an exceptionally moving and empathetic account of the impact of manufacturing plant closures on three Indianapolis-based workers, their families, and their community. It’s a human story about personal struggle, temporary victories, and luck, as well as a social and political story that examines how race, gender, class, and capitalist structures shape events and people’s understanding of them. For people who work on labour and skills issues but lack a working-class background, and those who have one but need a reminder, Stockman’s book provides a revealing glimpse into real-world experiences and perspectives. Fair warning: It’s equal parts hopeful and despairing.
What can we do about regions and people left behind? Nichola Lowe’s Putting Skill to Work: How to Create Good Jobs in Uncertain Times describes and analyzes real-world examples of local initiatives to both enhance innovation and provide people with skills development opportunities to take on the higher quality, higher-paying jobs that innovating firms generate. Recognizing that most firm-led skills development initiatives offer training and advancement to those who are already highly educated, Lowe investigates more inclusive approaches in advanced manufacturing in Chicago, Milwaukee, and North Carolina, with special attention to the role of workforce intermediaries in convincing businesses, educational institutions, and unions to work together to generate mutually beneficial opportunities.
A couple of other books are worth mentioning:
Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence examines how AI depends on various kinds of extraction despite being seen as “digital” and can both reflect and reinforce existing structures of power even while offering new ways of thinking and acting in the world. It brings a much-needed political economy lens to the ethics of AI discourse.
Sheila Jasanoff’s essay, Uncertainty, focuses on the many failures of the U.S. response to the pandemic, emphasizing the need to take uncertainty more seriously. In place of false certainty and hubris, Jasanoff asks us to consider “technologies of humility” that gather a wider range of views and insights to help navigate uncertainty more carefully and democratically. Thinking about uncertainty pervades her research (see, e.g., The Ethics of Invention) and is one reason why I often revisit her work.
I’ll add one more book to the list, although the link to innovation and skills is admittedly less clear. I regard JAWS as the greatest movie ever made and I will read anything I can find about its making and significance. Enter Carl Gottlieb’s 1975 book, The Jaws Log – a book I should have read years ago, but only got to recently. Gottlieb, who was both a writer and small-part actor on JAWS, offers a detailed insider account of the of writing, casting, filming, producing, testing, and marketing of the movie. He shares fascinating stories about director Steven Spielberg’s use of uncooperative live, dead and mechanical sharks to bring his vision to the screen; how the script was still being written while filming was already underway; and how the crew thread needles through local regulations to get the film completed on time and without completely alienating the locals in Cape Cod. The Jaws Log is an entertaining and instructive tale about a rag-tag team of skilled professionals trying to conjure success out of a mess. You can plan as much as you want, but innovation requires a lot of mucking about.
See you in 2022.