SubscribeNews: Innovation Council Gets Real
On Monday, November 16 in Winston-Salem, during a visit to Wake Forest’s Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Gov. Perdue announced the formation of the NC Innovation Council.
“We need to ensure that our people understand innovation and understand why it is very important for kids in North Carolina to learn in a different way and think in a different way,” Perdue said. “Their lives are going to be very different from the lives of the 1990s student. The economic edge they are going to have to have to be globally competitive is wrapped around curiosity, invention and innovation.”
Well, amen. And yahoo!
I’m on it, and I’m honored to be in the company of the other members, who come from private equity firms and businesses, community colleges, nonprofits, and government agencies, the state treasurer’s office and the state House and Senate. Steve Nelson, CEO of Wakefield Group, a private equity firm, and Al Delia, a senior advisor to the Governor, will co-chair.
No timelines yet as to when the work would get underway (I’ll pass those along as I get them), but the charges for the group are consistent with issues this community has said it cares about:
* coordinating public and private investments and policies to promote innovation;
* moving innovative ideas from the lab to the marketplace more efficiently; and
* strengthening collaboration among business, academia, state and local government.
So that’s the dream. If we do that and do it well, good job. But as Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote, “Between the dream and the reality falls the shadow.” As we’ve noted in a previous post, these sorts of Councils don’t always accomplish much. They can fail in a variety of ways, from recommending too many things to being too vague to being way too specific, but most importantly they fail by not following through on recommendations.
In the case of “innovation,” (this site’s definition: the translation of “new ideas and technologies into new systems, products and services,”, I think we all know some of the “low-hanging fruit” that North Carolina can pluck to make us a plucky contender for the title of the “most innovative place in the world.” In Paper 04, we even suggested some basic ground rules for the Council and came up with three “starter” ideas for the group to consider.
Now there’s some pressure on me and the Council to actually make good, meaningful recommendations. As Duke Ellington once almost said, “It won’t mean a thing if we don’t do thinking” – good thinking about high leverage recommendations and action steps that take advantage of this moment. This is truly an incredible opportunity for the state to start the things that will help us make a pivot (or pirouette) in our perspective on work and economic development, and start moving us toward new, greater expectations of ourselves .
That’s where this community comes in. I hope this site can become a place where you post your ideas, your thoughts about the changes you believe are most important to moving us down the road. I’ll let the other members know about the site and encourage them to keep up with your comments. With your collective brain, we can get a lot closer to developing truly useful ideas. Without you, it’ll just be dumb luck. Let’s start hearing some ideas!
What one thing could a state Innovation Council recommend that would change the innovation climate for NC businesses? Nonprofits? Education? In government? Send in your comments and we’ll get them up.!
Tags: Al Delia, Institute for Regenerative Medicine, NC Innovation Council, Perdue, Steve Nelson, Wake Forest, Wakefield Group