Document: The Global Innovation Index 2011: Accelerating Growth and Development

Innovation has always been an important element in the relative success of societies — economically, intellectually, and socially. And as we move from a world of independent, lightly linked societies to one of inclusion with a larger, more deeply interconnected global community, innovation is more critical than ever.

What is the role of innovation in transforming a society? How does this transformation happen? It is one thing to have a great idea — it is another to bring it to life. For innovation to thrive you need an ecosystem that can transform an idea into something truly meaningful.

This important work that you have in your hands, the Global Innovation Index, explores the transformative power of innovation. Significantly, it identifies the conditions and qualities that allow innovation to thrive, and highlights the role innovation can play in a nation’s economic and social development.

But there is another, even deeper question we need to ask ourselves: What is the role of innovation in addressing the great challenges that confront humanity?

We are at a very exciting time in history, a pivotal time, and the global community faces some daunting challenges. The planet is getting hotter. Cities are expanding at an astounding rate, creating a difficult environment for the delivery of basic services such as health care, public safety, and education. At the same time, while the world becomes more connected — there are more cell phones today than there are people — large segments of the global community remain completely cut off from the world of commerce, communication, and information that has become so critical to the establishment of healthy economies and prosperous people.

As importantly, these changes cannot be incremental — the solutions to our most daunting challenges will require bold, creative leaps. These challenges require new thinking, new technology, and new ways of collaborating — an open innovation approach to solving problems that is based on partnerships among industries, companies, national and regional governments, and research organizations and academia.

There are initiatives underway that are applying this model of open innovation to specific global challenges. One example I like to highlight is the GreenTouch™ Consortium, a group that is drawing on the expertise of companies and organizations from all sectors of the information and communication technologies (ICT) industry and academia to dramatically reduce energy consumption in ICT networks, a significant contributor to global climate change. Together, these varied and often competing organizations are working together to pioneer the new technologies on which energy efficient networks of the future will depend. These are not merely incremental improvements, but disruptive technologies that will change the nature of networks forever.