Members of the CIC community,

This special time between Thanksgiving and the end of the year is a time when big picture thoughts come to the fore.  This year, I found myself thinking about innovation.  I asked myself: how much does the work we do matter?

We all have friends in other meaningful careers.  Perhaps a friend crews an anti-whaling boat for Greenpeace.  Perhaps a classmate joined the military, and is keeping peace somewhere.  As innovators, how does our work stack up?

Having given some thought to this, I’ve concluded we should feel pretty comfortable at our next college reunions.  Lets look at some examples drawn from around CIC in the fields of medicine, software, and energy.

While a doctor can treat thousands of patients over a career, and should be commended for it, your impact can be much, much bigger.  The researcher who invents a new medicine or medical device can cure millions… even billions.  CIC-based Celgene has done this for cutaneous T-cell lymphoma.  InVivo is working hard on it for paralysis.  The same thing is happening in nearly every disease category.  Over the past four decades, new medicines have cut in half the number of hospital visits required by those suffering from 12 major diseases.

Similarly impactful innovation can be found in computing.  The geeks who created the Web, and the myriad tools that make it work, have essentially created the world’s largest, cheapest and most useful library, at little or no cost to the public, and have made it available even in places like rural Cambodian schools and the mountains of Nepal. Open source mobile operating systems such as that developed by CIC alumni Google Android are spreading it even further afield.  If knowledge and education are the foundations of democracy, surely this will help bring democracy to the world?

Likewise, advances in energy, such as the ultra capacitors being developed by CIC alumni FastCap Systems, as well as low-cost wind, clean-coal, solar-energy and numerous other areas of innovation, are opening up new avenues for how we will power our future.

OK, you say.  Some innovation really does matter.  But how about those of us who are in less earth-shattering innovative endeavors?  Does innovation still matter if we create new companies that, for instance, provide online marketing services, rent exotic cars, or invent new soups?

It turns out it does.  Big time.

For the past 30 years or so, the U.S. Census Bureau has been collecting data about where new jobs come from. Recently, researchers at the US Census Bureau and the Kauffman Foundation analyzed it closely. It used to be believed that new jobs come from “small business”.  But these researchers found that this previous conclusion dangerously missed the point. They have now found that they key is not “small firms”, but rather “new firms”.  Over the past quarter century all new jobs in the United States, and then some, came from firms that were less than five years old.  The rest lost jobs.  Firms less than 5 years old collectively created, net of job losses, 3 million new jobs a year.  Meanwhile, companies 5 years old and older collectively lost 1 million jobs per year. This is an agenda-changing conclusion for the economic development field, because it suggests that instead of pursuing quite so many policies supporting “small business”, governments should really be pushing policies that support the creation of new business, such as entrepreneurship education. Fortunately, this message is now beginning to be internalized by the economic press, as highlighted in this recent piece in the Wall Street Journal.

The importance of innovation seems to be cropping up even in the global balance of power.

Yesterday, in his New York Times op-ed “The Big American Leak“, Tom Friedman calls attention to the fact (highlighted in the wikileaks cables) that the U.S. has been reduced to begging and bribing even very small countries to help it accomplish its goals. He provides numerous examples that are pretty uncomfortable for Americans to hear. He laments our dwindling power in the world, and says the problem is that we have no leverage. We are so dependent on oil that we prop up shady regimes for fear that their replacements will deny us what we need.  We cannot hold a hard line.

Friedman provides an example of how those of us in the innovation community may hold the key to unlocking the problem:

Think how different our conversations with Saudi Arabia would be if we were in the process of converting to electric cars powered by nuclear, wind, domestic natural gas and solar power? We could tell them that if we detect one more dollar of Saudi money going to the Taliban then they can protect themselves from Iran.

So, whether it be the direct value of our innovations, the jobs we create, or the enhancement of the global power of the developed world, our work is critically important to the health and well-being of our nation and the world.  Congratulations on picking such a meaningful career, and have fun at that next reunion!

Tim Rowe