Europe’s Innovation Opportunity

By Adam Bly, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Seed Media Group, USA*

Inter-connectedness, inter-dependency, and complexity are recurring themes at recent World Economic Forum gatherings. It is now widely recognized to be the state of the world. Yet we remain gridlocked on Doha, paralyzed on Kyoto, and generally not yet able to realign governance to solve for this new reality. And despite bountiful talk of innovation worldwide, it is largely directed at creating national good. This is understandable coming out a recession and with unemployment at present levels. Yet the fundamental challenges facing the world cannot be solved without a new vision and framework of innovation for the global good — with the appropriate incentive structures to encourage this behavior.

We are in Vienna discussing Europe’s innovation profile and agenda. Perhaps Europe’s most profound modern innovation could well be how it mobilizes its people, research organizations, and companies against common challenges for the good of the whole — at times in opposition to what’s best (on the surface) for any individual entity and their own competitiveness agenda and metrics. As the birthplace of various innovations in global governance, Europe has an opportunity to once again show the world how to organize society to solve big problems. Let Europe be Europe.

While clearly the continent will need to innovate to address its own pressing energy, health, demographic, economic etc. realities, it should seize the moment to innovate on innovation itself.

*Adam Bly attends the World Economic Forum on Europe and Central Asia in Vienna, Austria 8-9 June 2011 and is guest blogging for the Forum.