systematicHR

Once again, from the Talent UnConference (TalUnCon) hosted by Electronic Arts on January 25, 2006. ((From the Talent UnConference, January 25, 2007. Ideas expressed in this post may be directly attributed to the TalUnCon or might have been triggered by a discussion there.)) The Big Pipe session discussed the current state of education in the United States and some of the deficiencies there. I’ve been talking a lot about innovation and creativity on systematicHR lately, and I was intrigued by this discussion and how it might apply to innovation. Specifically, what types of education works best for innovation, and where is the U.S. positioned in comparison to other countries?My thought is that to train for innovation, you must train students to think in a cross-functional and multi-threaded approach. This is exactly the type of education you will find in some of the great MBA programs, where people learn to apply strategy to IT, finance, marketing and other classes, and then learn to apply them all against each other. This can also be found in many undergraduate schools – particularly the small liberal arts colleges. Here, students are not asked to learn a vocation like accounting or marketing. Instead, they are asked to delve into a topic and dissect it in an analytical way. The future of work includes 2 things: designing a product and producing a product. The designers of the world will be the major problem solvers using creativity and innovation to advance the consumer experience. These designers will come out of curricula that take thinking and analysis from multiple directions, and instill the ability to be creative in their students.

So that’s college and maybe the MBA as well. What about high schools? I don’t honestly know much about high school education, but being at Electronic Arts, I thought deeply about the role of video games. Often criticized (rightly so, but it’s more about parental control than the industry), video games can be a source of transformation in the way young people think. The right video games keep the player thinking and watching about multiple treads of though at any given time. These games have been one of the major transformers in the “millennial” generation – a generation who have shown the ability to multi-task and problem solve at a level prior generations have not come close to.

Thinking about other countries, I’d guess that rising economic powers such as India are performing well at developing infrastructure aimed at the technology market. That is that they are turning out engineers and programmers in masses previously unseen in the world. China has similar potential, but not the infrastructure to execute on their potential as of yet. What the current industrialized nations do well, and especially the U.S., Canada, western Europe and Japan, is training for creative and innovative thinking that rising nations like India do not. I’m not saying that there are not incredible thinkers coming out of India, but that the focus of the educational system is currently a product that emphasizes systematic type thinking. India’s advantage (and China to some degree) is that they send students to the far reaches of the world and the talent often goes back home. This is a huge advantage over the U.S. as most students are educated here and stay here. The potential to develop new ways of creative thinking based on cultural differences is not as widespread.