I have nearly finished reading reading Thomas L. Friedman’s latest book, “Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need A Green Revolution and It Can Renew America” and it has been an inspiration. Friedman’s discussion of the potential for energy technology innovation has particularly excited me. However, he points out significant problems that deserve greater thought including a a lack of investment in such technology. In discussing investment in innovation, Friedman writes:
Before I go into what sort of price signal we need, though, let me underscore for a moment just how feeble the American system has been during the last fifty years when it comes to stimulating clean energy innovation. Let’s start with a statistic. The total investment in research and development by electric utilities in the United States in 2007 was about 0.15 percent of total revenues. In most competitive industries, the figure is 8 to 10 percent. If your total investment in R & D is 0.15 percent of revenues, that’s not going to buy you much more than a few subscriptions to Popular Mechanics and Scientific American. In fact, the American pet food industry spends more each year on R & D than the American utilities industry does.” (p. 294, Chapter 13: The Stone Age Didn’t End Because We Ran Out of Stones)
If you look at the annual budget of your library, research unit or school media center, what percentage of your budget is dedicated to researching and developing new services, programs and ‘products’ for your users? I suspect that academic libraries have good potential for innovation since they tend to foster and incentivize research activity through grants and providing staff with time to focus on research projects. While the innovations developed by library vendors and technology companies have been very valuable, I wonder if some parts of the profession and our sector have grown somewhat reliant on our suppliers for new innovations. I do think there is great work being done by librarians and the evidence based practice movement is promising. I think we need to go beyond that though. Based on my reading of Friedman (e.g. he tells the story of the US company First Solar that took years to produce and manufacture its solar energy technology successfully) and other sources, successful innovation requires going through many failures and trying many different ideas before finding ideas that work. In addition to providing time and funds for innovation, librarians and libraries need to allow and encourage more trial and error, more ideas and yes, more failures to come up with new innovations.
What’s your favourite example of a library or librarian innovation? How was it developed?
Related posts:
