That sounds way too sensationalistic, and it probably is. But the drama of that statement is certainly rooted in truth.

Allow me to explain.

Several years ago, I got enamored with the concept of ‘innovation’.

So much so, in fact, that it became a personal buzzword, advocacy, unifying battle-cry.

I read all the books and delved into all of the websites. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The Innovator’s Dilemma. Innovation : The Five Disciplines. Closing the Innovation Gap. Innovation to the Core. Open Innovation. Innovation Nation. Innovation X. If the book had the word ‘innovation’ in its title (even the sub-title), it had a 90% chance of ending up on my bookshelf. I would get indoctrinated in the religion of IDEO (the Shopping Cart video and the innovation bibles, The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation).

For a time, some really cool friends and I put up Kolektib – an Innovation Hub in the creative hustle-and-bustle of Cubao X. We did Innovation Workshops internally and externally. It was an exquisitely fun time.

Even social entrepreneurship, for me, was a form of innovation – albeit social innovation. Hapinoy and Rags2Riches are expressions of melding social development with business models, a rather revolutionary approach which would certainly qualify as innovating.

I eventually synthesized my knowledge. I wound up conceptualizing, creating, and teaching a class in Ateneo on Innovation. It would tackle the why’s, the what’s, the how’s of the topic. I wanted to transmit the spirit to a next generation of innovators which would try to conquer and/or change the world.

The one line i always wanted my students to remember : Innovate or Die.

But beginning last year, my innovation lens would slowly shift. Not on a different tangent, but rather on a different depth.

I’m significantly more experienced and quite wiser. For all intents and purposes, I’ve changed. But more importantly, the world has changed at a mind-spinning rate – far outstripping my own evolution.

The first decade of the 21st Century was characterized by dizzying change, hyper-competition, unbridled growth – all of the factors that led to an innovation explosion. Globalization was at full-swing, the Internet began to fulfill its promise of changing everything.

And everything seemed possible. Growth was so palpable and reachable, and so businesses began pouncing on the massiveness of the opportunity. Driven by sheer momentum, they just plowed full steam ahead.

An innovation avalanche would ensue.

Innovation and Design consultancies would have a field day. So many new products, services, processes, and business models would emerge. I should know – it’s what I taught :

How Zara had reinvented the supply chain, allowing them to launch new fashion lines at lightning speed.

How the Wii would tackle the Blue Ocean of game consoles, beating the higher-performing Xbox 360 and Playstations by going on a different tangent and tackling non-gamers.

How Procter & Gamble used Open Innovation and launched connect + develop, unleashing a torrent of growth for their brands under AG Lafley’s watch.

More consumers were opening their wallets, and companies were feasting.

But towards the end of the decade, the world would undergo yet another step-change, perhaps an even larger one than the last.

Crises of global proportions would enter the lexicon.

A financial crisis would infect the world over, leading to national economies teetering on the brink. It was a full-blown meltdown and it washed over countries like a worldwide tsunami.

And speaking of tsunamis, the world became a real-life disaster movie. Environmentalists have been banging the alarm bells on the planet for so long, but it’s certainly only in the past few years that climate change has become real to the person on the street. When Typhoon Ondoy hit the Philippines, it was a shock to the system – it dumped one month’s worth of rain in half a day, causing floods in areas we never imagined were possible.

This climate change crisis is of course linked to to the energy crisis – our over-dependence on carbon-based fuels. Generations ago it wasn’t tangible, but now we see just how finite non-renewable energy is. It’s like we’ve got lung cancer and yet ironically still need two packs of smokes a day just to keep on moving.

And while all this was happening, the gap between the rich and the poor continued to widen. The proportion of the world’s population that survives under $2 a day still goes between a third to one-half of the total human race! (depending on which statistics you look at). Without a doubt, the population and poverty crisis continues to rear its ugly head.

And so in the span of a decade, we went from an age of seemingly unbridled growth … and plummeted into an age of uncertainty. An Age of Massively Complex Problems.

And that’s why a nagging feeling in my gut gradually snowballed, until my lens shifted.

I remember some of the projects that were conceptualized in my Innovation Class. A better kind of toothpaste. Refillable packaging for laundry detergents. Heck, even an innovative cigarette that would light without matches. Of course there were some that were more interesting – especially those who were in the social innovation track.

But with all due respect to my former students, it was the teacher who was at fault. We were thinking too small. We were throwing our energies at the wrong things. (just look at my slides)

Power is useless, if misdirected. Same goes for Innovation.

Innovation is good at tackling any problem, but it can be so much greater if it tackled the right ones.

And so I’m drawing a line on the sand, demarcating where my old thinking ends and my new perspective begins :

The only problems worth solving, worth investing your life in, are meaningful ones.

In an Age of Massively Complex Problems, do we really need to design a better toothbrush?

Do we still want to use innovation to drive unbridled growth and overconsumption, for things that people don’t really need but we’d just want them to buy?

Do we want to continue ransacking the planet with novel products that don’t really add anything extraordinary to people’s lives?

I say, that may have its place in the world, but certainly not in mine.

I will invest my time, my resources, my life, in innovation that, frankly, matters.

Meaningful innovation that adds real value to people’s lives, that tackles real problems plaguing individuals, society, and the world.

A lot of Big Problems. A lot of Big Opportunities. A lot of Big Innovations needed.

I call this new evolution of my definition, Innovation(+). Innovation plus, Innovation positive, Innovation with meaning.

The time has come for us to put collective energies into innovations that can create positive differences in people’s lives, for society, and the world at large.

We need platforms for participation; Heck let’s take it a step further as Platforms for Activation – where people are actively engaged in helping things move not just onwards, but upwards.

And so it’s in these specific challenges that I will be investing my energies on :

1. Social Innovations at the Base-of-the-Pyramid
- How can we co-create business models, products, and services that serve essential needs for those that live under $2/day?
- How can we make the poor active participants and co-creators in the common drive to get them out of poverty?

2. Development of Technologies, Products, and Services that Positively Advance the Human Condition
- How can we create new innovations in education, healthcare, energy, and communications that sustainably serve the needs of this generation and the next?
- How do we use innovation and design thinking to tackle everyday problems of society – traffic gridlock, transportation, crime as some examples? (in fact, IDEO has evolved Design Thinking into tackling Big Problems – just look at Open IDEO).
- How can the Big Brands, Big Products, and Big Services reinvent themselves into positively advancing the human condition?

3. Harnessing the Web for Massive Connection, Collaboration, and Change
- As I mentioned earlier – how do we create Platforms for Activation? I can think of no better example than how Iceland recently engaged its citizens to write the constitution.
- How can we use web to either rebuild or create new institutions? Financial institutions, Educational Institutions, Healthcare Institutions, even Governments?

4. A New Kind of Society
- How do we transition a paradigm shift from the traditional economics of GDP into one that measures happiness and prosperity?
- How do we go from unbridled production-consumption-growth into true, sustainable living?
- How do we balance the currents of globalization, localization, and community?

5. Innovating for The Planet
- There’s just no way getting around tackling the Climate Crisis head-on, it’s quite simply the biggest problem that we as a collective species have to contend with.
- In fact, I love what Al Gore writes in his new book/app ‘Our Choice’. In addressing the Climate Crisis, he wants ‘to make the rescue of civilization the central organizing principle of our politics, economics, and action.’

So there. A new personal roadmap, a clearer direction, a manifesto on where I wish Innovation+ will go. Where it will take us, or where we can drive it towards.

One of my all-time favorite quotes is by technologist Alan Kay – “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” Such wise words in an Age of Massively Complex Problems, an age which needs more and more of us to do Innovation(+).

So I had my car’s compressor (an integral part of a vehicle’s air-conditioning system)  replaced the other month, and it cost me an ouch-worthy twenty thousand-plus pesos.

I for the life of me have absolutely no more use for it. And so I asked around on where I could sell this worn-out piece of machinery. It turns out that the only establishment that will accept it is a junk shop.

And so I canvassed across a few of these junk shops. I then realized that this one-time twenty thousand peso spare part was now going for the princely sum of – uhmmm, five hundred bucks. That’s a full 97.5% percent depreciation of it’s original value!

For all intents and purposes, the compressor can now only be remelted as scrap metal.

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In my innovation class, I share a personal observation on the proliferation of junk shops around the Philippines. It’s a phenomenon you’ll see whether you’re in the city or in rural roadsides.

There are apparently a lot of Filipinos who reap the residual value from trash by transforming it again into raw material. The peculiar thing though is that a junk shop is agnostic on the throwaway product – it can be a laptop, a chair, a compressor, a high-end watch – once melted, they all transform into un-engineered homogeneous steel. This is why the way scrap material is bought is in volume and in weight – the ubiquitous ‘per kilo’. Plastic will fetch X amount per kilo, steel will fetch Y amount per kilo, Rubber is at Z and per kilo, and so on and so forth. And as my personal experience with my compressor shows – the value plummets dramatically with this process.

Now, in the same vein of talking about junk shops, I also share a perspective on how innovation creates more worth as you go through the value chain – the process wherein one goes from

Raw Materials > Product Design and Development > Production > Distribution > Marketing & Sales

In other words, the process whereby inventors, engineers, designers, entrepreneurs – a.k.a. innovators -  take the raw material and layer more value by identifying critical market insights, and then develop and make products and services that people need and are willing to pay for.

Now that’s not as easy as it sounds – there’s a lot of thought and investment that goes into the innovation process. But it’s precisely this line of thinking that begs the question, the choice :

Do we extract, manufacture, or recycle raw materials – OR do we layer on insight, engineering, and design to create a much-more valuable product? It’s a fundamental choice between producing a P500-peso piece of scrap metal or a P20,000-peso compressor.

Put another way : Do we want more junk shops – or more design and production shops?

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For me, the proliferation of junk shops already shows which side of the fence the Philippines is on. It seems that we’re focusing on the low-value side of the spectrum. Even worse, we’re moving backwards through the value chain – we take something valuable and take the easy way out by simply reworking them into scraps. By doing this, we actually end up depreciating and devaluing products!

This now results in a downward spiral because we’re not creating the products and services that people want – and hence we end up having to rely on other people – other countries – to fulfill this gap.

As such, I think that as an individual company, or at a much more macro-national level, we’ve got to seriously consider the following options :

1. Move through the Value Chain

We’ve got an abundance of raw materials – let’s take it through its logical conclusion and move across the value chain – processing, production, packaging, design, and marketing. In the Philippines, a simple example could be  processing of agricultural products into packaged goods. But aside from this, there are more industrial areas that we can certainly enter.

2. Innovate!

Discover, engineer, invent! Countries with much less natural resources than us are sourcing raw materials elsewhere and yet are able to transform these very same materials into higher-value products. There are so many entrepreneurial opportunities out there – so many industries and products that the ever-evolving marketplace is demanding, running the gamut from food to daily needs to technology.

Now, this is actually the stand that InoventDesign is taking.

3. Upcycle!

if we must deal with scraps, then let’s make sure that whenever possible, we create more value and not just regress back to low-value raw materials. There are certainly environmental benefits on recycling; But the truth is that sometimes, the energy and costs used to transform scrap waste into raw materials is more expensive than just extracting new raw materials.

This approach is obviously the one that we are taking with Rags2Riches. Scrap pieces of cloth have become high-end designer bags – thus resulting in high-value impact.

Even in such a simple business as Hapinoy’s Sari-Sari Stores – a business as relatively low-value as junk shops (especially since it’s retail rather then production) – we are also grappling with value creation. Our roadmap is precisely on a long-term trajectory to create new wealth for the communities. (read : watch this space for the next few years)

—

It’s certainly my hope that we as Filipinos create world-class products and services. Let’s not be content with mediocrity!

If we really want to build a better future, we’ve got to rethink the fundamental logic of our businesses – are we happy to take leftover scraps, or do we want to create more value?

Interestingly enough, a group of students had started a social enterprise idea that for me, showed significant promise. It wasn’t just a concept;  They’ve actually prototyped and run a small-scale pilot as part of the course requirements. In fact, with some further refinement, the enterprise was viable. Sales were already being generated, and I could see how it could evolve into larger things.

You would think that the teacher who guided them through this project would be enthusiastically encouraging the students to pursue the enterprise post-graduation.

But the contrary proved to be true.

The students wanted to pursue the enterprise. The teacher, instead of rallying behind this, actually insisted that they apply for a 9-to-5 job instead. That is the better path to pursue, according to her. The social enterprise would just be too risky.

This teacher, whom I don’t know from Adam, has a class on business and entrepreneurship. Yes, my friends. Entrepreneurship.

Imagine my disappointment when I heard this.

Granted, the teacher might have been thinking that the students would benefit from some years’ experience as an employee. I’d really like to give her the benefit of the doubt.

But from the way it was narrated to me, that might not be the case. The teacher was adamant that the students be practical and go for the safety of employment instead. By the way, it might interest you to know that the teacher isn’t an entrepreneur.

Thankfully, there was one member of the group who adamantly wanted to pursue the enterprise, and did go for it. In that bullheaded decision, I see the seeds of a true entrepreneur being born.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it. That business could very well fail. It IS risky. This could be a very hard road to take.

But entrepreneurship is never about using kid gloves – even when dealing with, well, kids.

You fall, you pick yourself up, you move along. That’s what entrepreneurs do. But it’s important that they actually leaped first.

Entrepreneurship is hard, period. Arguably, social entrepreneurship even more so. But if we don’t encourage people to take the plunge, then we’d pretty much never get anywhere.

Peter Drucker said, “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”

We need our schools – and our teachers – to spur more courage, not dampen it.

The SkyEye team listed above. Not in picture are : JB , Chemical Engineer from La Salle; Serge Gonzales, 2nd Year Management Student (Chief UAV pilot), and Philip Cheang 4th year BS Information Design.

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Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s) that can do aerial video/photography, SkyEye envisions itself as providing Aerial Imaging and Mapping, Interactive Mapping, and enabling Traffic Support Systems, as part of its portfolio of commercial services.

Now, an amazing factoid is that this team – Matt, Roy, Martin, Vinni, Kylo, and Happy – are still undergraduate students of the Ateneo – tinkering with technology and figuring out a commercial business model out of it.

So, never being one to miss an opportunity to try something novel – as this certainly falls into my ‘One New Thing A Week’ category – I met up with the group in the Ateneo SEC Field to check out this intriguing project :

Serge Gonzales and Matthew Cua of SkyEye, with their UAV.

The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with a Lumix LX3 attached

You can view the UAV’s camera through goggle displays while the pilot mans it with a radio controller

Picture of me face-to-face with SkyEye; Pilot Serge Gonzales manning the controls.

Picture taken from SkyEye. Also in the picture are Dr. Greg Tangonan and Paul Cabacungan of the Ateneo Innovation Center (more on that later).

Here’s a video of SkyEye in action :

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All-in-all, it was a really cool experience to have actually tried out SkyEye. It was like playing a Flight Simulator using Terminator vision goggles.

But beyond the nerdgasmic angle, my entrepreneurial mindset eventually kicked in and my mind was racing through real-world applications of this technology. And Aerial Photography is just the tip of the iceberg.

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Now, I’d like to take a step back and look at the SkyEye Project in a larger context.

Because the SkyEye Project is the kind of student-centric innovation being cultivated at the Ateneo Innovation Center, a nexus point wherein Ateneo School of Science and Engineering undergrads can collaborate with other colleges – as well as other schools – in order to explore, tinker with, and apply new technologies to the real world.

But while it’s fraught with practical experimentation and applications – as evidenced by the SkyEye project – it also has an eye of incubating student projects, interfacing them with the industry, and bringing them to market.

In fact, I have two hats in dealing with AIC — #1 as a resource (Greg Tangonan, the Director, has invited me on board as a resource), but also #2, as a customer. And this is because Hapinoy and Rags2Riches are collaborating with AIC on a few key projects.

Ultimately, the AIC gives me hope that a new generation of tinkerers with business sense are about to set loose to the world-at-large. And maybe somehow, this will catalyze a new wave of technology-based entrepreneurs.

In this Module, we tackle the qualities of what makes Innovators … well, innovators. And also what we can do to imbibe and emulate that — by discovering our PassionFuel, dabbling in MindJunk, and gaining clarity on our MissionDrive.

HERE’S TO THE CRAZY ONES!

TED, our inspiration behind putting up the WhyNot?Forum, is coming to Manila!

This particular event is called TEDx Manila, and is being organized by Filipino UP Professor and education advocate Rom Feria (himself a TED Fellow).

TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. Our event is call TEDx (place), where x=independently organized TED event. At our TEDx (place) event, TEDTalks video and live speakers will combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group.

TEDxManila is going to be held on December 5, 2009, in UP Diliman’s Malcolm Hall (College of Law). For more details, especially on how to apply — check out their official website here.

Shameless plug, I’ve also been invited to speak

Here are some pictures from the Y4IT event.