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?

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Space Ship One, the world's first privately built and operated space ship, was built to win the X Prize. Can libraries learn from this?

As I was cooking yesterday, I listened to Peter Diamandis, founder of the X Prize foundation, describe his project to get launch the commercial space travel industry through prizes on the Big Ideas program. Diamandis is part of a larger history of organizations providing awards to solve important problems. The most famous example of this is the longtitude prize offered by the British Admiralty in the 1700s (the story is told in entertaining detail in Dava Sobel’s book Longitude). The general idea behind prizes is that it encourages many people to solve a problem from all over and goes beyond simply recruiting the usual suspects.  The effort and money expended by applicants often far exceeds the prize money. The original focus on the X Prize foundation was focused on space travel but they are now interested in a range of problems including energy and life sciences.

This project has me thinking about applying the prize ethic to the library world. There are some prizes out there already that tend to recognize outstanding individuals but these kind of awards do not appear to have the same effects as the X Foundation. The missing ingredient is encouraging people to focus on a big, challenging problem and then go from there. So, let’s say there was a million dollar prize available to people that solved pressing library problems, what could we get solved? One challenge: how can we turn  public libraries into a Third Place? In the academic context, how can we make the process of using research databases more seamless? In a special library context, the challenge could involve something like how to we get librarians into boardrooms and executive teams? I have also been thinking a bit about library architecture and design of library spaces; are there better ways to do that? After coming up with challenges, the next step is figuring out who will fund the prize. Why should engineering and technology get all the entrepreneurial energy?

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