Cross-posted at The Huffington Post

Professional circumstances have given me a monster backstage pass to see how innovation really works in many countries around the world, as well as in our own. I want to bring this knowledge home to fuel a national conversation on these important issues. And so with these words I am pleased to launch “Innovation Nation” as my offering to the blogosphere.

I begin my first HuffPost with some puzzlement. It is January 18, 2008, the presidential campaign has been in full swing for longer than most of us would like to admit, and the “innovation” issue is still conspicuously MIA from discourse and debate.

We’ve had the Iraq “frame,” and now the recession and change “frames.” But what about the Innovation “frame?” Are we just not getting the importance of innovation? Vannevar Bush, presidential science advisor, said it best in 1947, “A nation that loses its science and technology will lose control of its destiny.” More recently the National Academy of Science referred to the problem as a “gathering storm.” And in my own recent book, Innovation Nation, I state that America is losing its innovation edge with profound implications for our security and prosperity as a nation.

Is anybody listening out there in leader-land?

History will show America’s current innovation melt-down to have been an egregious self-inflicted wound. I would need ten times this space just to recite a list of dismal facts about how poorly our national innovation system is performing. Some headlines: our young scientists are abandoning their careers with increasing frequency, talent is increasingly not coming to our storied shores, our public education and R & D are showing significant erosion, we’re strapped for cash, other countries are leading us in a growing number of scientific fields, and nobody seems to care.

The innovation frame in national politics has been conspicuous by its absence. Instead, we have heard increasingly frequent (and tedious) calls for change. But change is driven by innovation, which is the wellspring of progress. Change has to be about something or it is just novelty. In other words, if change is the answer we seek, what is the question? And, it is a multitude of changes - driven by innovation capability and harnessed to a compelling national idea - that leads to transformation. Otherwise, change is just… change.

Wise corporate leaders have always known that change is galvanized in the presence of a set of big ideas that set the vector and allow countless instances of innovation to drive it. We need to have a sense of where we are going if we are to arrive at a meaningful destination.

I have three hypotheses about why we haven’t heard more about innovation.

1) It’s hard to define. True enough - most people still have a hard enough time distinguishing between creativity and innovation, let alone defining the role of entrepreneurship in innovation. Many policy makers will make the elementary mistake of equating innovation with science and high tech, when it fact it has to do with a broader array of business model and process innovation that can be driven by design and the arts.

2) It’s hard to talk about. If we can’t define it, how can we hope to have a meaningful conversation about it?

3) We don’t have the right national narrative for innovation. This gets to the heart of the matter. Talking about innovation feels a little like talking about preventive medicine: we know it’s important, but it never seems to reach the highest priority level. On the other hand, throw in a little chest pain and it’s time to call 911. That’s why I have called our present situation a Silent Sputnik. Unlike the original Sputnik in 1957 that galvanized our country into action with its first (and sadly last) national innovation drive, our present situation lacks urgency and therefore it’s no surprise that we’re not taking needed action.

Which brings us to the presidential election. Whether the agenda is innovation or change – it must start at the top. There is no company that has succeeded at a large-scale change or innovation effort without involvement and advocacy from the CEO. Well, we are voting for the equivalent of a CEO of this country in November and I think we deserve to hear from the candidates as to how they view innovation in much greater detail. We need answers from them to such questions as:

* What they plan to do about our innovation “problem” in all its many-headed glory: from science policy to education, strategic investment and the formation of new kinds of global alliances.
* How they see the process of developing a meaningful national strategy for innovation.
* How they plan to allocate stewardship and responsibility for executing that strategy.
* What kind of metrics they plan to use and how they will define success.
* What they plan to invest in.

Perhaps most importantly, what is their point of view. How do they connect the dots into a diagnosis of our innovation “problem” is and how do they frame our innovation challenge in light of a larger national narrative?

We urgently need a robust national conversation on these issues. As a nation, we deserve it. And if I have anything to do about it, we will get one.

In posts to come, I’m going to cover such topics as how innovation “works” in other countries such as Finland and China that are racing for a new innovation high ground. I’m going to document what’s going on in this country - both the hopeful signs as well as the dismal facts. And in doing so, I hope to enlist you in helping to build Innovation Nation right here in the United States of America.

Bruce Nussbaum, who runs Business Week’s excellent innovation section, has selected Innovation Nation as one of his ten best books on innovation to get you through the recession. Here’s the full list:

1. The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking by Roger L. Martin.
2. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction by Thomas K. McCraw.
3. Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Sync? Seth Godin.
4. The Design of Future Things by Don Norman.
5. Innovation Nation by John Kao.
6. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.
7. The Future of Management by Gary Hamel.
8. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
9. The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda.
10. Everyday Engineering: What Engineers See, by Andrew Burroughs.

Business POV, a Chicago-based site that uses video interviews to do business journalism, has posted a two-part interview with John Kao about a wide range of innovation issues. Part 1 concentrates on innovation hotspots and part 2 looks at innovation in organizational transformation.

There are a lot of other innovation-related videos on the site, which is well worth a regular look or adding to your RSS feed reader.

The excellent BBC radio program (or should I write programme?) In Business has prepared a  documentary about corporate innovation. I have no idea what will happen in the editing process, but I had a fascinating conversation with presenter Peter Day about the topic.

If you’re within reach of the BBC Radio 4 signal (or want to listen to it through streaming media), it will be broadcast on Thursday, December 27, at 8:30pm GMT and on Sunday, December 30, at 9:30pm GMT.  Once the program has been broadcast, it will be available as a podcast on the In Business site.

The Commonwealth Club has announced the talk I’m giving there on January 14 on America’s Innovation Challenge.

You can listen to the interview I did with Drexel Kleber on Kicking the Anthill here.

Innovation Nation has been named by Business Week as one of its top ten business books of the year. Here’s what they say:

Finally, in a book that reviewer Bruce Nussbaum called “scary, insightful, and ultimately very useful,” consultant John Kao asserts that America’s competitive advantage is going, going, nearly gone. Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do to Get It Back (Free Press) notes that today, talent is more widely dispersed across the globe than ever before. Venture-capital pools are launching a generation of new startups across Asia and Europe. How should the U.S. respond? For one thing, Kao would spend $20 billion to create 20 innovation hubs revolving around such things as clean energy, digital media, and health care. Kao certainly has big ideas—but he is far from the only author providing smart thinking for the New Year.

The full list of books is:

1. In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India, Edward Luce
2. Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, Joe Studwell
3. The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World, Alan Greenspan
4. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Nassim Nicholas Taleb
5. The Strategy Paradox: Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure (And What to Do About It), Michael Raynor
6. Boeing Versus Airbus: The Inside Story of the Greatest International Competition in Business, John Newhouse
7. The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea, Steve LeVine
8. The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, Julia Flynn Siler
9. The Billionaire Who Wasn’t: How Chuck Feeney Secretly Made and Gave Away a Fortune, Conor O’Clery
10. Innovation Nation: How America is Losing its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do to Get It Back, John Kao

Chrystia Freeland, the U.S. managing editor of the Financial Times, picks up Innovation Nation and finds a pessimistic message:

As billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad told me last month: “Frankly, in America we’ve become fat, dumb and happy.” In his new book Innovation Nation , John Kao echoes Broad: “We are rapidly becoming the fat, complacent Detroit of nations”.

Part of what Broad and Kao are responding to is the rebalancing of relative global wealth and power prompted by the collapse of communism and the rise of emerging markets, especially India and China. This is the great good news of our age, but I understand how it can feel uncomfortable for America to adjust to being merely first among equals.

But they also are worried that something more dangerous than this flattening of the Earth is taking place. As Kao puts it: “Just as we are beginning to slack off, others are stepping on the gas”.

On this point, foreigner though I am, I’d like to urge them, and their fellow Americans, to be a little more, well, optimistic. It’s true that the balance sheets of the nation’s households, banks and, indeed, the nation itself are looking strained at the moment. And a few decades of prosperity have created a country which, as Kao notes, “spends more on astrology than astronomy”.

My worries about the current situation of the U.S. spurred me to write the book, certainly. But I remain hugely optimistic about the nation’s ability to reinvigorate and reinvent itself. One of the reasons for my optimism is the openness identified by Freeland. Chapter seven of the book is largely dedicated to a discussion of the importance of openness in many forms. Here’s Freeland’s view:

America has one great strength that inclines me to bet that it will not only work its way out of the subprime mess, but also retain a comfortable position of global economic leadership. That strength is openness…

Openness is valuable in and of itself - once we are safe and fed, liberty is an enduring human need. But even if that sounds to you like the abstraction of a latte-drinking liberal, I think you will agree that openness - to money, to ideas, to people - is one of the most important drivers of which economies will flourish and which ones will founder in the coming century.

Richard Florida has a pithy round-up of some of the pros and cons on the United States as innovation nation on his blog. Recently transplanted to Toronto, Florida isn’t optimistic about the future for the U.S.

I stand by my prediction from Flight; Small states have a keen advantage in the new globalization. Canada, Australia, and the Scandanavian nations are best positioned, economically and socially to benefit from the age of creative globalization.  Large old economy states - most notably Russa but also Germany, France, Japan and the United States - have their work cut out for them and suffer from extreme scelerois of the sort Mancur Olson long ago identified.  China and India, as big as they are, have a long, long way to go  before they become real players in terms of innovation, creativity and talent attraction.

I keep reading interesting reviews of Innovation Nation. Charles Lee Boyd in the Charleston Post and Courier had this to say:  “Kao reminds us there is a vital distinction between innovation that simply improves what is and innovation that defines what could be. Stay tuned.”