[ossig] Negroponte's article at the star online

["Mukhsein Johari" <mukhsein@email.com>]

http://star-techcentral.com/tech/story.asp?file=/2003/2/11/itfeature/newtech0&sec=itfeature

Creating a culture of ideas
BY NICHOLAS NEGROPONTE

Excerpt:
------

NNOVATION is inefficient. More often than not, it is undisciplined, contrarian, and iconoclastic; and it nourishes itself with confusion and contradiction. 

In short, being innovative flies in the face of what almost all parents want for their children, most CEOs want for their companies, and heads of states want for their countries. 

And innovative people are a pain in the ass. 

Yet without innovation we are doomed – by boredom and monotony – to decline. 

So what makes innovation happen, and just where do new ideas come from? The basic answers – providing a good educational system, encouraging different viewpoints, and fostering collaboration – may not be surprising. 

But some things – the nature of higher education among them – will have to change in order to ensure a perpetual source of new ideas. 


------
My comment:

All this is really good advice and probably quite known to many of us on this list but, I wonder...will the powers that be even _dare_ to encourage contradictory and non-conforming viewpoints here?

Perhaps when the powerful few have too much to personally lose, it would not be in their best interest to encourage too much non-conformance, eh?

Which, unfortunately, means we would continue to be nothing more than consumers of the world, never producing anything worthy of note that could really be called _ours_. I'm not saying that there aren't any local innovators but they are so few and far between and seldom fostered.

What? We produce much of the cpus' used? We make the most air-cons? Yeah, sure...but it is also true that Japanese car makers make almost no cars in Japan. And it is also true that they research and design almost no cars outside...

Regards,
Mukhsein Johari

-- 
_______________________________________________
Sign-up for your own FREE Personalized E-mail at Mail.com
http://www.mail.com/?sr=signup

Meet Singles
http://corp.mail.com/lavalife


------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe: send mail to ossig-request@mncc.com.my
with "unsubscribe ossig" in the body of the message