Dubai World vs. Innovation?

Let’s get past the credit issues of Dubai, which will get cleared up, and look at what the Emirate can do to create a long-term, viable future of providing real  value. Up front, it won’t be about tall buildings or unique landscaping — it’s about global problem solving. These ideas apply to any company, anywhere.

As background Dubai has been working for years now to create a global center of trade motivated primarily by its diminishing oil deposits. Rather than wait for its oil to dry up, the monarchy determined to turn Dubai into something unusual — a cross between a trading and shipping port and a theme park. The purpose was to create an area so attractive to global businesses that Dubai would become the place to transact business and enjoy a premium lifestyle.

When Dubai’s incredible ambitions were publicized the reaction was frenetic and near frantic: Dubai was the new “It. ” And if you weren’t a part of It you would be left behind. Dubai, viewing the nearly insane response, borrowed and built to keep up with what appeared to be a global onslaught of demand.

Unfortunately the truth was that the hype being generated for Dubai (not by Dubai) was self-feeding and not solidly connected to reality. Like a snake eating its own tail, eventually the hype could not sustain itself and died.

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After my father passed in February following a very full, very accomplished 88 years, I had the less-than-pleasant opportunity to sift through his personal possessions. Amongst a multitude of books, printouts and miscellanea of his hobbies were some very old-school tools of design. Mechanical pencils and a large round cast iron sharpener, French curve templates, guides and so on. All from his days designing everything from trade show displays to R&D labs to battleships.

My father was an innovator. He subscribed to no particular codified “body of knowledge” but his results were inspiring. The majority of his great work preceded ubiquitous CAD/CAM installations. As a testament to what simply “got done” without technology, he had designed and built an enormous miniature model city for use in a military flight simulator, long before the existence of a computer that could render scenic imagery in real time. Quite literally he designed a system where a video camera “flew over” a terrestrial model while the video was piped to a CRT in the simulator’s cockpit.

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You don't need much to get to that "Ah-Ha" moment

Survive the recession but not the recovery? File that under “most unfortunate irony.”

“Innovation” is thrown around today like re-engineering was in the ’90’s — as something magical that will cure every economic and company woe. Innovation is expected in products, services, business processes, research, social communications, and of course technology. We know that without rethinking just about everything we do, we’re never get going, let alone get ahead.

But what I run into every day are businesses balking at innovating anything besides ways to cut costs — and those tendencies are understandable. Many companies are purely in survival mode, having let go everyone they could, reeled in every cost and cut back every activity possible. And that latter item is a real problem — cutting back on every activity often means cutting back on innovation.

As someone who has designed a great many products and services I know that it can take some serious cash to innovate and create. Money that just isn’t available right now for too many companies.

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Frozen with fear — that’s one way to describe the state most American businesses are in today. No different than most American consumers. Virtually everyone is afraid to move forward as the future is so uncertain. So we wait to see what’s going to happen. If the banks will start loaning. If demand will pick up. If the market will rally for a while.

In that waiting, people seek the silver bullet, which during this tough time seems to be “innovation,” as if the very term would resurrect the economy just by our focusing on “it.” One would think somehow that innovation, which has always been a hallmark of American business, was something entirely new that we have not been doing, or not doing nearly enough of. And that by simply being innovative we could end our economic woes.

In fact we’ve now so over-used, over-hyped, and over-exposed the term that it has essentially lost its meaning.

The truth is innovation is neither something new nor is it magic bullet. It will not save the economy.

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