Innovation: brave new language of lifelong learning
Tara Fenwick, University of Alberta, Canada
Paper presented at SCUTREA, 33rd annual conference, University of Wales, Bangor,
1-3 July, 2003
It is by now commonplace to acknowledge sadly the merging of economic discourses with discourses of lifelong learning. Adult educators have systematically attacked the subjugation of human development to the language and logic of the market, through critiques reiterated passionately and repeatedly of lifelong learning. Innovation is an example of a signifier that has flooded the rhetoric of both lifelong learning and industry, securing for itself a brave new position of dominance while appropriating pursuits of learning and knowledge for potentially destructive effects. Classic critical questions are indeed important in these language wars – innovation in what, on whose terms, for whom and in whose interests – and these guide much of the discussion following.
But to reject altogether the premises and legitimacy of innovation is to ignore its demonstrated power to stir desire in the contemporary cultural imaginary, rallying commitment and justification for all sorts of practice and research in the name of learning and education. And to presume that its presence signals the settling of a sort of innovative discipline is to reify something that is utterly fluid and perhaps more open to reconfigurement than we may recognise. Here, I want to examine critically the language of innovation as it appears in selected literature and policies focusing on lifelong learning. I wish to explore questions about different meanings of innovation that appear to be enacted when it is thrust into education, about who is supposed to innovate what and at what cost, with consideration to what constitutes innovation. But I also hope to discover its openings, its productive possibilities, amidst what admittedly are marketised, individualised, human capital-oriented policy conditions inscribing lifelong learning.
Innovation ascending in the language of learning
Innovation is frequently cast as the sine qua non driving competitiveness and productivity in theory, research, and government documents addressing the place of lifelong learning in the so-called knowledge economy. In Canada, for example, a comprehensive national program of research funding targets the four areas of education, lifelong learning, management and entrepreneurship in a combination that clearly links learning, earning and innovating. Called ‘Initiatives for the New Economy’, the program specifically invites studies that address questions such as, What conditions and factors stimulate innovation in firms and organisations? What business practices underpin innovation? What significant factors affect the relationships between innovation and organisational change?
The most recent and widely discussed policy papers on lifelong learning, produced by Canada’s federal Human Resources and Development Commission, are called an ‘Innovation Strategy’ (HRDC, 2002). The language of these documents weds demands for innovation and skill development with notions of learning and success in a globalised economy -- even weaving in social values of inclusion and equity -- as though these are all naturally aligned and uncontested domains. Innovation is defined almost exclusively in economic terms, as ‘both the creative process of applying knowledge and the outcome of that process’ (p. 19). Heady prose throughout the document declares with authority and inevitability that in ‘the innovative race to be run’, we must measure ‘innovation outcomes’ and ‘innovation performance’ in the ‘innovation system’ which connects learning, education, researchers, investors and entrepreneurs.
In workplace literature addressing learning, the language is studded with terms of innovation. The mushrooming body of organisational learning studies hails innovation as the creation of variety where new solutions, new approaches or new ideas are discovered. As McGrath (2001) argues, in our current environments of greatest uncertainty, innovative learning holds greatest importance: ‘those organisations that prove to have superior abilities to manage exploration will be better able to adapt to changing circumstances’ (p. 119). Writers advance theories about the processes of innovative learning, seeking ways of removing so-called barriers to innovation, and encouraging workers’ experimentation, risk-taking, and variance-seeking (Crossan et al., 1999). Innovation will develop the new products that ensure a competitive edge, or improve the efficient production and distribution of these commodities.
In higher education in Canada, where federal transfers to provinces for the purposes of funding postsecondary institutions has been squeezed throughout the 1990s to an all-time low in 2002, innovation has become the lever upon which their sustainability rests. The Presidents of Canadian Universities recently completed a framework agreement with the federal government to increase funding through the Canada Foundation for Innovation, Centres of Excellence and Canada Research Chairs program. To secure this funding, the agreement requires universities to double the amount of research conducted in their universities and triple their commercialisation performance by 2010 (Briskin, 2002). The goals guiding the framework are to increase research and knowledge transfer through commercialisation and innovation. As the Innovation Strategy declares, ‘Academic institutions have an essential role to play in strengthening Canada’s innovation performance. They have acknowledged that they too must continue to strive for excellence and rise to the innovation challenge’ (HRDC, 2002, p. 22).
The individual is the target of relentless innovation discourses. Particularly in this self-reflexive age of personal responsibility for designing life and work, adults are urged to continuously innovate and to develop their innovative abilities if they want to survive. Innovation why and for what is communicated through multiple texts, ranging from organisational mission statements and job performance appraisals to personal development bestsellers and home improvement media. Whether scholars competing for research grants that focus their work on generating innovative product, or workers configured as competing human capital whose value rests on their innovative capacity as well as their actual production of innovation, attention has been effectively deflected from social relations in which creative processes and purposes are constituted. The individual is reconstituted and judged in terms of its innovative potential.
The growing obsession with innovation can be observed in the rapid diffusion of a new bestseller called The Rise of the Creative Class by Harvard economist Richard Florida (2002), which is currently being quoted by newspapers, CEOs and university presidents across North America. In it, Florida claims that economic growth depends on a ‘supercreative core’ of workers, about 30% of the labour force, who value creativity, individualism, difference and merit. He urges cities to create hip conditions attracting these elite innovators, who want to be quickly accepted and participate culturally on their own terms. The receptivity to this message is not surprising when the dominant belief appears to be, as the Innovation Strategy states it, that ‘in today’s knowledge-based economy, the importance of innovation has increased dramatically’ (HRDC, 2002, p. 19).
Shiny dreams, anxious frontiers
A critique of innovation discourses in learning might start with classic questions: innovation in what, on whose terms, for whom and in whose interests? In economic logic, innovation appears to be simply about generating inventions that can be sold – products and services – or applied to improve their production. The broadest critique, then, would naturally underline how the encroachment of this language of innovation into learning and education distorts and commodifies human creativity. But along with critique, we need to explore possible reasons why innovation discourses have so quickly been taken up in policy and within this, the most objectionable distortions to learning appear to occur in innovation’s emphases on novelty, utility, performance, acquisition and exclusion.
Novelty
What is celebrated in this language of innovation? Certainly that which excites attention, which promises new solutions or at least dazzling diversions, displacing those ideas and practices dismissed as traditional or derivative. Thus learning purposes and rhythms become surrendered to the imperatives of commodified fashion, to the quickening pace of product cycles and voracious customer demand for the latest, in new theories as much as new hats. Any enterprise or idea hoping for sustainability in this throwaway culture needs to demonstrate its own periodic reinvention, or at least sufficient renewal to display a ‘NEW IMPROVED!’ sticker. So, when does an invention become accepted and performed as an innovation in a given community, and in whose eyes? As Engestrom (1999) has pointed out, what is pronounced novel rests on community values, perceptiveness, historically shaped attitudes, expectations and desires. When we stop to think, in our own experience, about which innovations are listened to and incorporated into the systems in which we live and which are ignored, rejected, or tried once and forgotten, we can see the complex and unpredictable mediating conditions of innovation.
Criteria for adjudicating the worth of ideas and products centres on what is most recent, celebrating the quickly shifting present configuration of simulacra before it inevitably must dissolve, according to innovation thinking. This thinking infects not only educational institutions and programs, but individuals. Reinvention of identity has become the pursuit de rigeur among those who can afford it.
Utility
Beyond the rapid pace and ephemeral life of the novel, language of innovation yokes knowledge and identity to technical problem-solving, the language of applied science, progress and the short-term. The appearance of any innovation depends on how problems have been defined, about which ideas historically have been pronounced as innovative solutions, and about how particular solutions are taken up and become embedded in social practices. Innovation also expresses a certain wistful belief in really useful knowledge, however mutable – what’s here is solid even if it lasts only until the next innovation or perceived need shift. This portends a disposable approach to knowledge and thought as well as products, eschewing both the historical and the long-term future. It is also magic thinking, investing hope in a future horizon that is always out of reach. In fact, in this new emphasis on innovation are enacted traditional archetypes of salvation through discovery, and our cultural hunger for new absolutes.
Performance
Anxiety throbs beneath the language of innovation. In Canada’s Innovation Strategy, rhetorical strategies of citing scientific-sounding reports then shifting to urgent imperatives play upon national insecurity: ‘Canada’s innovation performance is weak, and this is affecting productivity levels and economic performance . . . Canadians must become more innovative. Improvements in our innovative capacity are critical to productivity growth and wealth creation’ (HRDC, 2002, p. 21, 29). For individuals, demand for ‘innovative capacity’ appropriates lifelong learning on multiple dimensions: identities, biographies, lifestyle and knowledge. For workers who are good members of learning organisations, learning measured as continuous innovation is the primary expectation. People are not only cast in continuous deficit struggling to keep up with innovative changes and demands they have come to believe are inevitable, but are responsible for creating the changes.
Acquisition
Within the commodifying logic of capitalism, innovation is typically conceived as an object or performance -- a product, program, idea, formula, and so on – whose uniqueness can add value. The emphasis is then upon generating quantities of innovation. In education as well as industry, the result can be what Fullan (2001) describes as a Christmas tree effect: scattered flashes of projects and inventions acquired with little coordination or long-term integration, and burning out quickly. Workers become exhausted trying to generate or integrate the expanding number of inventions. Multiple innovations compete with one another for recognition, resources and control of practices. The overall ideology of expansive acquisition driving unbridled innovation is unsustainable and potentially destructive. Furthermore, because innovation is ultimately rooted in competitive relations, it seeks to outstrip the competition, to be recognised, to obtain credit for the innovation. These are old capitalist virtues of individual performance and self-interest, protecting intellectual copyright for one’s innovation.
Exclusion
Who is bracketed outside languages of innovation? Not only those who may lack the tools/resources/environments/encouragement to have developed capacity to be sufficiently innovative as defined by the dominant discourse. Also excluded are those whose wisdom lives in different worlds than the novel and acquisitive, or whose creativity is drawn to different engagements than improvement or entrepreneurial products. Florida’s vision of the new creative class that cities should entice and encourage carries ominous shadows of an increasingly ignored underclass – not just the uncreative, but those relegated to jobs not requiring, developing or rewarding innovation. As Field (2000) notes, the pressures of continuous innovation are widening inequality and exacerbating market assaults on fragile environments and communities. As educators we are implicated in these pressures, our research funds linked to an innovation imperative: our educative programs and personal performance accountable to its measures.
Recovering creativity, reconfiguring the language of innovation
Innovation is not unlike other signifiers of education and learning – empowerment, development, community, and the like – that have been appropriated and distorted by discourses of human capital and marketisation. As educators our recourse can be to attack or perhaps seek new languages. But I am drawn to the response suggested by Martin (2002), who challenges adult educators to reclaim our language. If we accept that innovation wields power as a signifier in current cultural discourses, but also accept Martin’s invitation to rearticulate market-ised language within alternate discourses and linguistic practices, we might seek to recover innovation in learning. The following suggestions are cast as continuous verbs to emphasise innovating as process rather than as object (to be brought forth, measured, exchanged and fought over), as tangled in social relations rather than enclosed within the heroic individual. As such we may be less likely to reify innovation as a matter of fragmented de-historicised production, and more likely to attend to its fluidity and potential for renegotiation.
Towards transgressing
Innovating opens opportunities to break free from overdetermined and repressive meanings. Transgressing authorised norms and language takes many forms: playing, imagining, deviating. Expressive arts on their own terms, for example, seek transgressive sites for exceeding linguistic boundaries, and celebrate learning as having to do with processes of imagining and interpreting – unshackled by questions of utility and performance. Welsh and Dehler (2001) recast innovation as transgressive impulses in organisations. Their examples of ‘constructive’ deviance and heresy explore dynamics and limits of transgression that open unexpected possibilities for organizations.
Towards tracing innovating networks
Acquisitive-notions of innovation cast knowledge as an object separable from the history of objects, actions and ideas in which it is entangled. When all the emphasis is then placed on the shiny new invention that manages to distinguish itself from the networks that produce it, these can be easily overlooked and forgotten. Writers using actor-network theory (see Law and Hassard, 1999), for example, have illustrated that innovative knowledge circulates in the interactions among people and objects in these networks. Questions about how they mobilise one another and negotiate ideas and practices – as well as how they each embed other networks of knowledge, such as an object that has both a technology and a history of uses – make the important shift away from targeting the individual to focusing on social relations. Moving emphasis towards tracing innovating networks means re-asserting knowing as politically constituted and situated in systems of ongoing practices, as a form of participation that is always dynamic and provisional. Innovating can be identified in terms suggested by Engestrom (1999): new forms of collaborative practice or new expansive networks.
Towards integrating
Ecologists remind us of an alternate emphasis to endless product invention: reviving practices already in circulation and re-engaging familiar, even ancient, wisdom. Even writers in organisational learning have claimed that too much attention is placed on innovation, when the more difficult and more productive processes are the integration of new ideas into organisational practice, whereby they are shared and eventually institutionalised within routines and procedures (Crossan et al., 1999). Engestrom demonstrates that integrating innovations in a community of practice depends on a much more difficult achievement: developing shared understandings of what is the problem or need demanding a new solution. New ideas emerge constantly. The most interesting questions focus on how these ideas achieve a presence and conceptual coherence in a community’s everyday language, then become anchored in the daily realities of the collective activity system. When innovation shifts from chasing the new to integrating old wisdom into our lives wisely and collectively, we might encourage greater sensitivity to fragile environments, regeneration of exhausted workers and organisations, and respect for connections already at work in communities.
A reclamation of innovation might begin by unhooking it, in lifelong learning discourses, from novelty, utility, performance, acquisition and exclusivity. Unhooking requires direct challenges and critical questions by educators. Just as innovation focuses on new and shiny novelty, we as educators may also be guilty of rewarding knowing that becomes distinguished as original – in our adjudication of each other’s work as well as our students’. Starting in our own practice, we can publicly question the emphases and forms of innovation where it appears in policy documents, research, institutional expectations, and assessment criteria. We can and should resist actively the obsession with innovation, stirring others to question along with us its historical trajectories and present consequences in social life. But further, we can do much in our teaching, research, program development, and participation in institutional life to redirect conceptions of innovation to transgressing, relating, integrating, and other alternate connotations that emphasise the social and subjective rather than the individual and objective.
References
Briskin L (2002), ‘Faculty expected to triple their commercialization performance’, CAUT