John Keo, Founder and CEO of EdgeMakers, an organisation that seeks to teach young people to become innovators, gave a keynote speech called “Bringing Innovation to Innovation” at the Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) yesterday (Tuesday), in the presence of Sheikha Bodour bint Sultan Al Qasimi, Founder and CEO of Kalimat Group. The keynote aimed to present a new perspective on innovation to make it relevant for an evolving, unpredictable world. "In other words, in order to create the future we want, we must bring innovation to innovation,” Keo said, “Innovation is not going away, at least any time soon. In fact the opposite is true, these days innovation is at the top of the leadership agenda worldwide. Yet the word is used and misused so often that it threatens to become meaningless. We’ve talked endlessly about innovation but our expectations for innovation have been raised and then in many cases left unfulfilled.”
Elusive though the definition is, Keo is uniquely placed to give a lecture on the subject as he has 30 years’ experience in innovation from creating companies, to producing Hollywood films; he was also a Professor at Harvard Business School and created the innovation program there. “I come from a very eclectic background,” he said, “and work with governments, people and organisations who want to make the innovation agenda come to life.”Keo said that this is the era of innovation because everything is changing, business has completely changed with digital disruptions putting high street stores out of business and technology completely revolutionizing the way business is done and how people communicate. “In Silicon Valley we use the slogan ‘Innovate or die” and in many ways this is absolutely true because as a company all you really have going for you is the ability to innovate more quickly than your competition,” he said. Keo went on to say that innovation is highly important today as “wicked problems” have been identified.
This is problems that seem to be intractable such as third world poverty, conflict and violence, or scarcity of water; wicked problems are those that seem to be incredibly difficult to solve.“The only way these issues can be resolved, it is believed, is through innovation, new ideas and people coming together to work out new ways to address these problems,” he said. “The younger generation were not born into an era of peace and stability and affluence like the millennials or the baby boomers before them and many want to address the problems of the world today through entrepreneurialism, or innovation and we need to help them to learn how to do this.” Keo said the issue was that not enough people knew what innovation was or how to do it to make a difference and that is where organizations like Edgemakers were helpful. “People get caught up with terms like entrepreneur, or creativity or innovation and whilst I maintain these are different things, finding definitions is not what is important, but teaching people how to innovate is. You do not learn how to play the piano from a PowerPoint presentation or a lecture, you have to do it, practice it, and innovation is a similar thing.”Keo said that schools haven’t changed or adapted in over 100 years, the model is the same of a teacher in the front, in a position of authority, giving information to children to learn verbatim and to regurgitate in an exam. This, he said, reflected the industrial age of education, it was a standardization and what was suitable at the time, but to solve modern problems, modern methods would be more appropriate.“A standard industrial method asks ‘how do you do this’ while innovation asks, ‘what do people need’. This is the purpose of innovation which is why I decided to devote myself to innovation learning for young people.”