In Reverse

The biggest challenges we face, in terms of the scale and speed at which we need to innovate, are to create new systems for water, energy, housing, health and education in the fast-growing cities of the developing world. The most painful challenge we face, however, may be in the developed world, to remake the established, incumbent, high-cost, highly engineered, specialist systems, products and services on which we have come to rely. Re-engineering and replacing those systems and products so they are more affordable and environmentally sustainable will involve not just creating new solutions — risky enough — but challenging and dislodging existing solutions. That challenge will provoke conflict. Innovation is creative, generative and exciting. But in the developed world, at least, it will also be seen as threatening, unsettling and destructive. Innovation will go hand in hand with conflict as well as creativity. Successful companies, cities and public services will not turn away from these conflicts. Nor will they minimise what is at stake. They will know how to respond creatively to the challenge. A prime example of the kind of leadership this will involve comes from the automotive industry, for so long the source of American and European leadership in industrial innovation.