Tag Archives: innovation

Links from Gov2.0 Summit talk and bonus material

My 5 minute lightening fast jam packed talk (do I do other formats? answer… yes) from yesterday’s Gov2.0 summit hasn’t yet been has just been posted to youtube. I love that this year the videos have the slides integrated into it.

For those who were, and were not, there yesterday, I wanted to share links to all the great sites and organizations I cited during my talk, I also wanted to share one or two quick stories I didn’t have time to dive into:

VanTrash and 311:

As one of the more mature apps in Vancouver using open data Vantrash keeps being showing us how these types of innovations just keep giving back in new and interesting ways.

In addition to being used by over 3000 households (despite never being advertised – this is all word of mouth) it turns out that the city staff are also finding a use for vantrash.

I was recently told that 311 call staff use Vantrash to help trouble shoot incoming calls from residents who are having problems with garbage collection. The first thing one needs to do in such a situation is identify which collection zone the caller lives in – turns out VanTrash is the fastest and more effective way to accomplish this. Simply input the caller’s address into the top right hand field and presto – you know their zone and schedule. Much better than trying to find their address on a physical map that you may or may not have near your station.

TaxiCity, Open Data and Game Development

Another interesting spin off of open data. The TaxiCity development team, which recreated downtown Vancouver in 2-D using data from the open data catalog, noted that creating virtual cities in games could be a lot easier with open data. You could simply randomize the height of buildings and presto an instant virtual city would be ready. While the buildings would still need to be skinned one could recreate cities people know quickly or create fake cities that felt realistic as they’d be based on real plans. More importantly, this process could help reduce the time and resources needed to create virtual cities in games – an innovation that may be of interest to those in the video game industry. Of course, given that Vancouver is a hub for video game development, it is exactly these types of innovations the city wishes to foster and will help sustain Vancouver’s competitive advantage.

Links (in order of appearance in my talk)

Code For America shirt design can be seen in all their glory here and can be ordered here. As a fun aside, I literally took that shirt of Tim O’Reilly’s back! I saw it the day before and said, I’d wear that on stage. Tim overheard me and said he’d give me his if I was serious…

Vancouver’s Open Motion (or Open3, as it is internally referred to by staff) can be read in the city’s PDF version or an HTML version from my blog.

Vancouver’s Open Data Portal is here. keep an eye on this page as new data sets and features are added. You can get RSS feed or email updates on the page, as well as see its update history.

Vantrash the garbage reminder service’s website is here. There’s a distinct mobile interface if you are using your phone to browse.

ParkingMobility, an app that crowdsources the location of disabled parking spaces and enables users to take pictures of cars illegally parked in disabled spots to assist in enforcement.

TaxiCity, the Centre for Digital Media Project sponsored by Bing and Microsoft has its project page here. Links to the sourcecode, documentation, and a ton of other content is also available. Really proud of these guys.

Microsoft’s Internal Vancouver Open Data Challenge fostered a number of apps. Most have been opensourced and so you can get access to the code as well. The apps include:

The Graffiti Analysis written by University of British Columbia undergraduate students can be downloaded from this blog post I posted about their project.

BTA Works – the research arm of Bing Thom Architects has a great website here. You can’t download their report about the future of Vancouver yet (it is still being peer-reviewed) but you can read about it in this local newspaper article.

Long Tail of Public Policy – I talk about this idea in some detail in my chapter on O’Reilly Media’s Open Government. There is also a brief blog post and slide from my blog here.

Vancouver’s Open Data License – is here. Edmonton, Ottawa and Toronto use essentially the exact same thing. Lots that could be done on this front still mind you… Indeed, getting all these cities on a single standard license should be a priority.

Vancouver Data Discussion Group is here. You need to sign in to join but it is open to anyone.

Okay, hope those are interesting and helpful.

On Governments and Intellectual Property (or why we move slowly)

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David H. sent me this short and fantastic article from Wired magazine last week.

The article discusses the travails of Mathew Burton, a former analyst and software programmer at the Department of Defense who spent years trying to get the software he wrote into the hands of those who desperately needed it. But alas, no one could figure out the licensing rights for the software it was supposed to work with… so it never went anywhere. Today Mathew has (unsurprisingly) left Defense and has open sourced the code so that anyone can use it. The lesson? The tangled mess of navigating all the license agreements isn’t protecting anyone and certainly not the public. It’s just preventing interesting new and derivative works from being used to render American safer.

In short, the crises here doesn’t have to do with size of government, but in a misplaced desire by many governments to protect “intellectual property.”

Now I understand the need of government to protect physical property. A forest, for example, can only be logged once every few generations, so allocating that resource efficiently matters. But intellectual property? Things like documents, data, and software code? It’s use is not diminished when someone uses it. Indeed, often its value increases when numerous people start to use it.

But rather than give to tax payers the intellectual property their tax dollars already paid for, our governments lock them down. Today, under the false belief that they are protecting themselves and potential revenue streams (that have never materialized) our governments copyright, patent and license all sorts of intellectual property our tax dollars paid for. In short, we treat ideas like we treat forests, something that only a handful of people can use and benefit from.

This has three happy consequences.

First, ideas and innovations are more expensive and spread more slowly. Remember the goal of innovation is not to license technology, its to use technology to enable us to be happier, safer or more productive (or ideally all three!). When our governments license technology that accomplishes one or all of these things they are, in fact, restricting the number of people who can benefit by giving a single actor a monopoly to sell this service (again, one tax payers funded to develop!) to tax payers or (worse) back to the government.

Second, we end up wasting a colossal amount of money on lawyers. With our governments pretending to be a corporation, managing all this intellectual property tax payers funded to develop, we naturally require an army of lawyers to protect and license it!

Finally, many governments are locked out of open source projects and communities. Since, by policy, many governments require that they own any code they, or their contractors develop, they cannot contribute to open source projects (in which the code is by definition, not owned but shared). This means free, scalable and customizable software and products that small companies like Google are forbidden within government. Instead they (and by they, I mean us) have to pay for proprietary solutions.

At some point I’d love to read more about how government got into the intellectual property businesses. I imagine it is a history paved with good intentions. However, the more I reflect on it, the more I wonder why the first order question of “why do governments have intellectual property” never gets asked. The costs are high and the benefits seem quite low. Maybe it’s time we radically rethink this.

Apps for Climate Action Update – Lessons and some new sexy data

Mick Jagger & why copyright doesn't always help artists

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I recently read this wonderful interview with Mick Jagger on the BBC website which had this fantastic extract about the impact of the internet on the music industry. What I love about this interview is that Mick Jagger is, of course, about as old a legend as you can find in the music industry.

…I’m talking about the internet.

But that’s just one facet of the technology of music. Music has been aligned with technology for a long time. The model of records and record selling is a very complex subject and quite boring, to be honest.

But your view is valid because you have a huge catalogue, which is worth a lot of money, and you’ve been in the business a long time, so you have perspective.

Well, it’s all changed in the last couple of years. We’ve gone through a period where everyone downloaded everything for nothing and we’ve gone into a grey period it’s much easier to pay for things – assuming you’ve got any money.

Are you quite relaxed about it?

I am quite relaxed about it. But, you know, it is a massive change and it does alter the fact that people don’t make as much money out of records.

But I have a take on that – people only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies wouldn’t pay you! They didn’t pay anyone!

Then, there was a small period from 1970 to 1997, where people did get paid, and they got paid very handsomely and everyone made money. But now that period has gone.

So if you look at the history of recorded music from 1900 to now, there was a 25 year period where artists did very well, but the rest of the time they didn’t.

So what does this have to do with copyright? Well, remember, the record labels and other content distributors (not creators!) keep saying how artists will starve unless there is copyright. But understand that for the entire 110-year period that Mick Jagger is referencing there was copyright… and yet artists were paid to record LPs and records for only a small fraction (less than a quarter) of that period. During the rest of the time, the way they made money was by performing. There is nothing about a stronger copyright regime that ensures artists (the creators!) will receive for more money or compensation.

So when the record labels say that without stricter copyright legislation artists will suffer, what they really mean to say is one specific business model – one that requires distributors and that they happen to do well by – will suffer. Artists, who traditionally never received much from the labels (and even during this 25 year period only a tiny few profited handsomely) have no guarantees that with stricter copyright they will see more revenue. No, rather, the distributors will simply own their content for longer and have greater control over its use.

This country is about to go into a dark, dark place with the new copyright legislation. I suspect we will end up stalled for 30 years and cultural innovation will shift to other parts of the world where creativity, remix culture and forms of artistic expression are kept more free.

Again, as Lessig says:

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
Ours is less and less a free society.

Welcome to copyright reform. A Canada where the past controls the creativity that gets built upon it.

Innovation at the Bottom of the Pyramid: The Olyset Net in Africa

A few years ago I read C.K. Prahalad’s The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, a stunning book about how development can take place and successful economies can emerge even in the poorest of places. Prahalad presents case after case of how companies conducted research and supported innovations at a cost point that helped foster products that could serve some of the desperately poor populations in the world.

The other day my friend John McArthur twittered about this company – which has invented a Permethrin laced mosquito bed net guaranteed to last at least five years (testing shows it often lasts 7). Better yet, it is significantly stronger than polyester nets being both tear-proof, wash-proof and never requiring treatment.

This alone would be a great news story. But it is the economy behind the net that is equally exciting. The manufacturing of the Olyset Net is creating jobs in Africa:

Production in Africa began in 2003 when Sumitomo Chemical provided a royalty-free technology license to A to Z Textile Mills in Arusha, Tanzania. Tanzanian production was further expanded in 2008 when Sumitomo Chemical celebrated the official opening of a 50:50 joint venture factory, expanding our partnership with A to Z in East Africa. From 2009, global production capacity will exceed 40 million nets per annum, with around 50% manufactured in Africa. Furthermore, Sumitomo Chemical has recently committed to expanding production into Nigeria, the African country with the greatest malaria burden. Once production is established in Nigeria, global capacity will be 60 million Olyset nets.

The news section of the website has still more good news. A Sumitomo Chemical Partnership with an Ethiopian Business will create 300 jobs in Kombolcha, Ethiopia. Is this development? Or is it Foreign Direct Investment creating jobs, feeding the African economy and helping solving one of the greatest scourges on the continent.

If you find this compelling, take a look at John’s newest Huffington Post piece where he outlines the new research and study Masters program he and Millennium Promise are helping create around the world.

Healthcare innovation

This link (via Gayle D.) is pure awesome. Turns out someone has decided to offer prescription drugs via an ATM. For policy wonks, this has all the hallmarks of a disruptive innovation.

I suspect that in the pharmaceutical industry the 80/20 rule is in effect. That being 80% of patients are using only 20% of the available drugs. So a small number of drugs account for the vast majority of all prescriptions filled. That means you could service a huge part of the market with only a handful of drugs on hand.

This is precisely what this ATM for drugs allows you to do. Moreover, it allows you to do it faster, cheaper and with a better experience for customers. That is precisely what a disruptive innovation is.

Indeed, you can see the early signs of its disruptive nature in the way it is being talked about.

The Canadian Pharmacists’ Association has endorsed the machine, but it appears oblivious to the machine’s implications (despite the very clear case study of the decline of bank tellers after the introduction of ATMs – although perhaps the idea of pharmacists comparing themselves to bank tellers is so threatening that they ignored that data):

Some pharmacists will undoubtedly feel threatened by the technology, says Jeff Poston, executive director of the Canadian Pharmacists’ Association.

But he predicts the machines will have only a niche role, likely in remote communities that have limited pharmacy services, since the devices offer patients a “lesser” form of communication with the druggist.

“I tend to think the face-to-face encounter with the pharmacist would win hands down,” he said.

Niche role? I suppose, if you count 80% of the pharmacy business as niche. I suspect this service will take off – and we’ll need fewer pharmacists. On the flip side, the pharmacists we keep will have to very good since they’ll be focused on the more dangerous, complicated and difficult prescriptions – which really is the best use of their time.

What about people’s alleged preference for face-to-face encounters? Perhaps this is a preference. But how strong is that preference? For me, it isn’t so strong that I’m willing to hang around in the pharmacy for 30 minutes while my prescription is being filled, or worse, to come back they next day. I suspect that the overwhelming majority of us will use the ATMs – just like we do at the bank.

Indeed, the president of the company that creates the ATMs for drugs – who is quoted later in the article – knows what’s really going on:

Just over 800 patients used the machines at Sunnybrook to obtain 1,200 prescriptions between June and September. A survey of 108 of them indicated that more than 95% received their drug in less than five minutes and would use PharmaTrust again, said Peter Suma, president of PCA. None of the prescriptions was incorrectly filled, he said.

Not everyone, however, was able to take advantage of the pharmaceutical ATMs. About a third of patients who tried discovered that their medicine was not available, said Dr. Domb, though PCA offers to deliver those orders to the patient’s home the next day.

Despite such limitations, Mr. Suma predicts his kiosks will be embraced by consumers accustomed to instant, technologically aided service, especially when the devices are “deployed ubiquitously.”

95% satisfaction rate? This technology is killer. And check out the different perspectives of the two quotes.

On the one hand, the industry expert and entrenched actor (the pharmacists association executive director) believes the ATMs will be restricted to a niche market (such as rural markets). In contrast, the disruptor (the president of PCA) sees these machines as being “deployed ubiquitously.”

They can’t both be right.

An International Baccalaureate Growth Strategy

I recently ran into a teacher from my high school who has been active in the advancement and growth of the International Baccalaureate program (IB). I participated in the IB program – as a certificate, not a diploma candidate – I believe it was a great experience. The program was demanding and interesting. Equally important, it helped prepare me more effectively for university.

The encounter – and the conversation – got me thinking about how IB should plan its expansion. Clearly one option is that it could expand in a uniform manner – pitching itself to districts in a more or less uniform manner. This is not their approach, and nor should it be. The fact is, some places in North America are going to be more receptive to IB than others. One option would be concentrating resources in places where the ground is most fertile and where success more readily achievable. In its strategic plan however, IB makes it clear that it does not want to only serve an educated elite. Consequentially I would advocate for a two pronged approach. One strategy for places where IB is going to be a relatively easy sell. Another for more hostile environments, where attitudes and resources will be harder to mobilize or change.

The only question remains. How to identify the two regions?

The answer, I believe, could reside in Richard Florida’s creative class maps.

If I were to imagine the type of parent interested in IB, it is likely one that believes in science, wants what is best for their child, has a broad, generally progressive, outlook on the world. They are probably interested in AP, but are even keener on something better. In short, present day IB kids are creative class kids. Their parents recognize the value of a strong education, and can generally afford the extra taxes currently necessary to subsidize such an education. Fortunately, Florida has mapped where the creative class lives in the United States. These maps are essentially demarcate the dividing line between areas that will be receptive and areas that will be more challenging for IB to establish itself. In short, IB should devise a “creative class” strategy and an “elsewhere” strategy. The two areas are likely very different in the questions that will need to be addressed, the allies located and mobilized, and the resources that will need to be marshaled.

(note: apparently IB is big in Texas, something that initially surprised me, but a look at this map suggests that, depending on where the IB schools are located, Texas is indeed fertile ground.)

Internationally, I might use Florida’s spiky world maps such as the one below which denotes patents per 10,000 people by region. The higher the spike, the greater the number of patents and the places where IB can most likely adopt it’s creative class strategy. The valley’s will probably require a different approach.

It would be fascinating to cross reference IB programs against these maps. I suspect there is already a high degree of correlation. Perhaps I’ll ask if they have any maps…

Articles I'm digesting – Feb 13 2009

New Planets & an Unknown Object Discovered Beyond the Solar System

Future telescopes such as NASA’s Kepler, set for launch in 2009, would be able to discover dozens or hundreds of Earth-like worlds. The Space Interferometry Mission (SIM), to be launched early in the next decade, consists of multiple telescopes placed along a 30 foot structure. With an unprecedented resolution approaching the physical limits of optics, the SIM is so sensitive that it almost defies belief: orbiting the earth, it can detect the motion of a lantern being waved by an astronaut on Mars.

The last sentence says it all. My mind = blown.

Fareed Zakaria – Worthwhile Canadian Initiative (via Sameer Vasta)

Canada has done more than survive this financial crisis. The country is positively thriving in it. Canadian banks are well capitalized and poised to take advantage of opportunities that American and European banks cannot seize. The Toronto Dominion Bank, for example, was the 15th-largest bank in North America one year ago. Now it is the fifth-largest. It hasn’t grown in size; the others have all shrunk.

So what accounts for the genius of the Canadians? Common sense. Over the past 15 years, as the United States and Europe loosened regulations on their financial industries, the Canadians refused to follow suit, seeing the old rules as useful shock absorbers. Canadian banks are typically leveraged at 18 to 1—compared with U.S. banks at 26 to 1 and European banks at a frightening 61 to 1. Partly this reflects Canada’s more risk-averse business culture, but it is also a product of old-fashioned rules on banking.

I’ve always thought Zakaria was one of the smartest commentators in the US. I’ve unbelievably excited he has his own show on CNN. Finally a show where real ideas are discussed not by pundits but by actual wonks. His show single-handedly elevates the entire CNN brand. Now he’s saying nice things about us. Hopefully we won’t let it go to our heads.

How the Crash Will Reshape America: The Last Crisis of the Factory Towns by Richard Florida.

When work disappears, city populations don’t always decline as fast as you might expect. Detroit, astonishingly, is still the 11th-largest city in the U.S. “If you no longer can sell your property, how can you move elsewhere?” said Robin Boyle, an urban-planning professor at Wayne State University, in a December Associated Press article. But then he answered his own question: “Some people just switch out the lights and leave—property values have gone so low, walking away is no longer such a difficult option.”

Perhaps Detroit has reached a tipping point, and will become a ghost town. I’d certainly expect it to shrink faster in the next few years than it has in the past few. But more than likely, many people will stay—those with no means and few obvious prospects elsewhere, those with close family ties nearby, some number of young professionals and creative types looking to take advantage of the city’s low housing prices. Still, as its population density dips further, the city’s struggle to provide services and prevent blight across an ever-emptier landscape will only intensify.

Many of the old industrial clusters are dying and we’ll have to manage this decline while helping figure out what the next wave will look like. This is part of the reason why think the federal government’s failure to invest in green technology/innovation will stand as one of the biggest lost opportunities of the century. At the peak of a financial crises and at the moment when our cities – particularly our mid-sized cities – need to think about what their economies will look like for the next 100 years (think renewable energy, green roofs/architecture, mobile computing, next-generation social services) we’ve plowed $30B into 20th century buildings and roads. Hopefully the good news of Zakaria will outweigh the bad news from Florida. I hope so, since it appears this crisis won’t be sufficiently significant to spur us to rethink our future.

Microsoft: A case study in mismanaging a business ecosystem

A lot of fuss has been made about Microsoft’s inability to compete in the online space and the web specifically. Indeed, it is widely acknowledged that Microsoft was slow to understand the web’s implications and adjust its product lines accordingly. How did the largest, most successful software company in the world fail to predict or even, once the future became clear, effectively adapt to the rise of the internet? More importantly, why hasn’t it been able to acquire its way out of trouble?

Numerous articles have been written on this, many focusing on Microsoft’s strategy and the fact that it likely faced a disruptive innovation problem. I’d like to supplement that analysis by focusing on the predatorial way Microsoft managed and engaged its business ecosystem in the 1990s. I’ve not seen this analysis before so I thought I would throw it out there.

The 1990’s were a good time for Microsoft. It experienced tremendous growth and its operating system was by far the dominant choice in the market place. It had tremendous leverage over everyone in its business ecosystem, including its competitors, customers and complementors. While this was seen as a source of strength (and profit) it also laid the foundation for many of its problems. The story of Microsoft’s competitors in its traditional marketplace – especially those that have adopted an open source space model such as Linux, Mozilla and Apache – is well documented and forms the core of the traditional disruptive innovation thesis. But I think Microsoft’s inability to counter these threats, as well as its inability to compete in new spaces – such as against Yahoo! or Google – isn’t just a result of the fact that it crushed its traditional competitors but also due to the mismanagement of its relationship with its complementors and partners. More importantly, the disruptive innovation thesis fails, on its own, to explain why Microsoft hasn’t been able to acquire itself out of its problems.

I’ve been told that one of Microsoft’s great strengths is that it has fantastic tools for developers (I’m not a coder so I can’t comment myself). However, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Microsoft lacked a sophisticated or long-term strategy for engaging the software products and companies those developers created. Given that Microsoft was sitting atop the computer software ecosystem the company had one goal – staying there. This lead it to view anyone as a potential competitor – or if not a competitor than at least someone eating into profits that it could otherwise capture. Rather than balancing the growth of the value network with trying to capture its fair share, Microsoft prioritized the latter over the former. Consequently, many companies that produced products within the Microsoft ecosystem – particularly for Windows – were often not seen as complementors, but as rivals. Microsoft was aggressive in dealing with them – it was gracious in that it would usually offer to buy them out – on its terms – but always looming in the background was the threat that if you didn’t sell to them they would copy what you did. Consequently, many little companies that designed applications that enhanced Windows were forced to sell – or were put out of business after Microsoft copied their products and integrated them into the operating system.

A business ecosystem is like a natural one. It doesn’t matter how nutrient rich the environment (like say, one with excellent development tools) if emerging lifeforms are consistently snuffed out, pretty soon they will elect to grow and evolve elsewhere – even in places where the nutrients are weaker. This is precisely what I suspect started to happen. Likely, fewer and fewer developers wanted to approach the Microsoft ecosystem with a 10-foot pole because they would either be bought out on unfavorable terms or at an early stage (before they were too valuable) or worse, Mircosoft would simply crush them by using its enormous resources to replicate them and eat into their business.

The repercussion of this is that Microsoft saw fewer and fewer new and innovative products being created for its platforms. Programmers and developers shifted to other platforms, or created whole new platforms where they would be free to grow ideas. This, I believe, prevented Microsoft from understanding how the web would change its business. Not only did its current profits create a disincentive to altering its business strategy but it snuffed out one of the few groups of people that could warn it, educate it and challenge it, about the impending changes – its complementors and partners. Equally important is that it diminished the pool of potential acquisition targets whose culture, technology and processes might have helped Microsoft adapt. There were simply not that many mid-sized mammals in the ecosystem: Microsoft had prevented them from evolving.

Today – based on conversations I’ve had with some people in Microsoft – I get the sense that they are trying to become a better partner (or at at least, they may be aware of the problem). Perhaps Microsoft will succeed in becoming a better partner. It won’t however, be easy. Changes to how one treats complementors and partners often require rethinking the very culture of an organization. This is never an easy or quick process. In addition, it takes time to rebuild trust and attract new blood into the ecosystem… and any misstep will count dearly against you.

There are also almost certainly some interesting lessons in this for other dominant players – such as Google. Will Google behave differently? I don’t know. In many regards Microsoft behaviour was rational. It was seeking to preserve its position and maximize its share of the pie. This was made all the tougher because its market was evolving and the future was unclear. No one knew which pieces of the value network would be critical (and therefor most profitable) and so Microsoft was simply trying to stake out as many of them as possible. It is easy to imagine Google behaving in a similar manner. But I suspect that if it does, it may also find it hard to escape Microsoft’s fate.

Big thank you to David H. for pointing out some typos and errors.

Canadian Foreign Policy as a Disruptive innovation problem

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After having a long brain storm session with some people interested in the future of Canadian Foreign Policy was inspired to write this thought experiment.

Perhaps a helpful way to frame our current Foreign Policy ennui is to see the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) as facing a challenge analogous to that discussed in The Innovators Dilemma – sometimes referred to as disruptive innovation.

Disruptive innovations are products or services that rather than simply evolving, overturn the existing dominant approach in a marketplace. Often the disruptive innovations starts off serving the low end of the market but it eventually matures and serves more demanding and larger clients pushing the established players out of business.

What does this have to do with DFAIT? Consider the graph below (a play on the wikipedia page graph). It used to be that DFAIT served four segments – from low quality all the through to the most demanding use. And yet, over the past decades other actors – sometimes in the private sector, but more frequently NGOs – began to offer services that more effectively deliver what political masters, or more often, citizens, were looking for. At first this was true merely of the lowest tier, travel agencies and news groups began to tell people where was safe and unsafe to travel and so the government ceased being a primary resource for this. Then NGOs began to effectively deliver services in the more traditional areas of advocacy and programs. Increasingly the government has retreated from that space. More recently, you’ve seen NGOs actually take the lead by moving into new areas of debate and creating supporting documentation for critical actors. At the same time you’ve seen other ministries become significantly more active in the management of “international files” that overlap with their areas of focus (eg. Health or the Environment).

This is classic innovators’ dilemma. A challenge to DFAIT from a community using a strategy that initially seemed marginal (and even helpful because it alleviated it of performing mundane tasks) has evolved into a true competitor, appealing (usually more effectively) not only for the hearts and minds of Canadians, but for the attention of other ministries and key influencers.

The real question is how does DFAIT compete? Again this is a thought experiment – I’m regularly impressed by the work done my people (many of them friends) at DFAIT. But the department has suffered over the past decade. It should be asking itself: can a (and how should a) centralized bureaucracy compete against an ecosystem of NGOs and other actors? DFAIT may be able to retreat to performing in only the “most demanding use” areas – but there is no guarantee that even this space is completely safe (although the government will maintain a monopoly on certain areas).

The real challenge as outlined in the Innovators Dilemma is that innovation is often difficult, if not impossible for the incumbent actor. One thing that gives me hope is that the department may shrink, helping it become more nimble. For example, I’m pleased to hear that International Trade may be heading over to Industry Canada. This makes all the sense in the world – can anyone today legitimately claim that there is a real difference between domestic and international industrial policy?

Smaller, leaner, and more partner oriented. I suspect one way or another this is the future of Foreign Policy. The question is, can Foreign Affairs innovate its way into that space? The author of the innovators dilemma isn’t optimistic – but then they were writing about private companies that could go bankrupt, not government ministries that can live on as the undead for extended periods of time… hardly an outcome Canadians or our Foreign Service officers, deserve.

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