Leonardo da Vinci, innovation and execution speed [story]

It is not easy to write about Leonardo da Vinci, a man of genius. Various serious authors (i.e. more qualified than me) have written about him. Here are some notes following a visit to an exhibition at the Accademia in Venice.

Leonardo was perhaps the original Renaissance Man, highly competent in a variety of disciplines, from painting to engineering. His technical notes, much like his paintings, are both detailed and beautiful. He was incredibly advanced for his time – we are talking about the 16th century.

Leonardo used analysis and research to solve a variety of problems, both artistic and scientific. As a trained artist, the observation of reality was one of his priorities. He was also fascinated by mathematics, which formed the basis of his investigations.

It was interesting to find out that he was rather slow in execution. This infuriated some of his patrons. One of the most famous episodes is Leonardo’s horse, a sculpture commissioned by Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. It took Leonardo 7 years to produce a clay model. By that time, the French had invaded Milan and ousted Sforza. French soldiers ended up destroying the model.

The conventional wisdom is that Leonardo was not particularly concerned with producing results but rather with tackling difficult problems. However, it could have been the other way round: the world around him was not sufficiently organised to channel his creativity, or his sponsors were too impatient to invest in what you would today label as R&D. There are other, more elaborate explanations for Leonardo’s behaviour, namely a psychological analysis by Merleau Ponty which suggests that Leonardo had a deep-rooted problem with authority.

While da Vinci was clearly a genius, today’s innovators are likely to share a number of traits with him, including the drive to solve problems in a new way. But innovation and speed of execution do not always go hand in hand. Specifically, product development often takes longer than expected and shareholders are impatient by nature. There is evidence that in the case of quoted companies under intense analyst scrutiny, managers feel pressure to meet short-term goals and invest less in long-term innovation projects. These managers are not slackers, they just tend to get more cautious when the amount of scrutiny increases. The other side of the equation is that equity research analysts are often knowledgeable about an industry but do not always understand the mechanics of innovation (to put it mildly).

From this perspective, the world has not changed much in the past 400 years.

Related articles

• Leonardo da Vinci: a different mind (criticalthinking8.wordpress.com)

 

Innovation, nonconsumption and the Portuguese education system [barrier]

The recently published IMF report on Portuguese public sector reform (“Portugal: Rethinking the State—Selected Expenditure Reform Options”) lists several reform options and advice based on country data and comparisons to international standards. The comparison is drawn mainly with EU15 countries, which is a sub-group of countries in the EU comparable to Portugal.

While innovation is not directly mentioned in the report, some of the measures suggested are really about process innovation. In the private sector, process innovation is constantly used to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace and to create wealth. In the public sector, process innovation should be used as a tool for creating efficiencies in government organisations, which lead to better services for the public.

In his article “Why Innovation Matters In Politics And The Public Sector”, Faisal Hoque approaches innovation in the public sector with business and financial concerns that are basic and widespread in the private sector. Return on investment, risk management, technological innovations and efficiency are essential for the success of any company and should also be a concern of Government officials and managers when investing public funds in critical sectors such as health and education.

In the education sector, the IMF identifies a serious inefficiency in the management of schools. The IMF’s analysis reveals that there is over staffing and that career progress for teachers is based solely on seniority. Schools have very limited management leeway and in fact cannot choose whom to hire. Can you imagine a company being managed without the ability to choose its own staff? This is what happens in this case: every year, a number of teacher positions become vacant nationwide. Teachers apply and the choice is made based on seniority.

Taking a step back, a useful concept to describe the failures of the Portuguese education system is nonconsumption, which describes an area which appears unattractive to the companies or institutions that offer a service and where at the same time, some people would like to do something but are unable to get access to the available offering. At first sight, there are no obvious areas of nonconsumption in education: everyone is required to attend school up to a certain age. However, if you look deeper, you will probably find that a large proportion of Portuguese students simply do not manage to reach higher education, although they would like to, because they failed to grasp the more basic concepts between ages 12-18. This is the crucial problem that needs to be addressed. The first step towards solving this problem is to place motivated and capable teachers in front of those students that aspire to attend university but do not have the means or the background to do so. This is simply not achievable if the schools cannot differentiate between teachers based on their competences.

These problems have plagued the education system and seem to have flown under the radar screen of previous (and numerous) reforms of the education system in the past. The IMF suggests a better appointment system for teachers (not only based on seniority but on competence) and a framework whereby money would “follow the student”, which would allow better teacher hiring practices and a more efficient provision of education services.

While some other measures proposed by the IMF in the report are painful, involving loss of jobs or the reduction of income for civil servants, this type of reform is really about the implementation of important and sometimes long overdue structural reforms.

Types of innovation and economic growth

How much will European economies grow in the medium term (3-5 years)?

Different quarters will answer in totally different ways at present. If you are talking with a politician, the answer will probably be that, following a period of austerity and deficit reduction, Europe will be back to growth.

Analysts and investors will likely give you a different answer. Everyone is talking about the so-called muddle-through economy.  Few analysts expect a period of sustained growth in Western Europe before 2020.

These different views will be the source of many difficulties in the coming years. It is very likely that politicians will continue to over-promise until the political class itself realises that the muddle through scenario is, in fact, most likely to happen.

This is all to do with types of innovation. Clayton Christensen wrote about types of innovation in a recent article (see link below) and mentions three broad categories: empowering innovations (think Ford T), sustaining innovations (think Toyota Prius) and efficiency innovations (online banking). While the first type of innovation involves building huge factories to bring new products to the masses, thus creating jobs, the second type is neutral (in Christensen’s example, Toyota sells less Camrys as it increases its Prius sales) and the third type destroys jobs (your bank will employ fewer cashiers if customers prefer to bank online).

Sustaining innovation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Europe’s economy is all about sustaining and efficiency innovation at present. This means moderate economic growth and persistently high unemployment. We just need to adapt to this new reality. It will impact the way we work and live.

Related articles

• A Capitalist’s Dilemma, Whoever Wins the Election (nytimes.com)
• Toyota Hits 1 Million Hybrids in 2012 (thetruthaboutcars.com)

[Updated Nov 2012 by Hugo Mendes Domingos]