Innovation in business

Ike Señeres

IT is interesting to note that the Asian Institute of Management (AIM) has introduced Master of Science in Innovation and Business (MIB) as a new course. What is interesting about that is that it is an MS course and not a Master of Business Administration (MBA) course. That by itself is already an innovation, because it expands the horizons of AIM beyond its original business of providing MBA course. Prior to that, it has been offering the Master in Entrepreneurship (ME) course, mainly intended for business owners who have already established a track record in an entrepreneurial business, meaning to say not just start-ups.

Just to clarify, the course is billed as “innovation and business” and not “innovation in business”, which could be another dimension. The bottom line is, MIB graduates have the advantage of being honed in both innovation and business. Of course in another dimension, they could also innovate within their own businesses. Just like in the ME course however, it appears that the MIB students already have ongoing businesses that are technology driven, again meaning to say that these are not just start-ups. I think that there is a lot of wisdom about this, to provide courses that would enable owners of existing businesses to move forward.

And now for the numbers: AIM was able to graduate 12 MIB students after 10 months, of course charging high tuition rates perhaps in the level of their MBA and ME courses. I think that the upside here is that we finally have an MS course that would give the right tools to entrepreneurs who are also innovators. The downside however, if we could say that, is that there are not too many students who could enroll, because of the high tuition rates. Given the fact that AIM is already doing its part, it should already be up to the other universities to also do their part. Just imagine if we could graduate not just hundreds but thousands of these students.

Although innovation in business is relatively a new topic, I now recall that for many years now, I have been writing about two old topics, namely “science culture” and “knowledge based economy”. Although these are basically two separate topics, these are actually interrelated to, and are complimentary to each other. There are many ways of describing what the “science culture” is, but as far as I am concerned, the obvious manifestation is to have a Science Minister or a Science Secretary who is a member of the Prime Minister’s or the President’s economic team. There are also many ways of explaining how and why that should be, but the bottom line is to create new value added out of new inventions that would strengthen the economy.

At the risk of oversimplifying it, it would appear that the opposite of a “science culture” is a “trading culture”, and the opposite of a “knowledge based economy” is a “trading economy”. In a “trading culture”, a country would only be buying goods and services as these would come and go, mainly trading in existing products without creating new value added. Another characteristic of this is to just keep on trading in what is already in the market, without innovating in order to create what is not in the market yet. Although it could be said that Singapore is prominently a “trading culture”, it is also known to create new products with new value added.

In theory, a “knowledge based economy” should produce intellectual property rights (IPRs) that would create value added, and these would be in the forms of patents, copyrights and trademarks. As everyone knows, patents could be created using science and technology, whereas copyrights and trademarks could be created using plain and simple creativity. In a manner of speaking, it could be said that all IPRs are created using innovation, but it could also be said that hard core innovation is already in the realm of inventions. Perhaps nobody can really draw the line between innovations and inventions, but let us just say that the latter would require actual prototypes.

I understand that in some countries, the Science Minister or a Science Secretary actually leads the economic team and that would of course be the ideal scenario. However that is done, the final outcome should be the creation of new products with new value added, being the result of creating new inventions. To cut a long story short, what is really needed is an ecosystem that would discover new innovations, fund these and bring these out into the market. As it is now, no such ecosystem exists, and it is really a good thing that private organizations such as the AIM are doing their part. By the way, AIM also has a “Leaders in Innovation Fellowship” (LIF), a postgraduate certificate program that is research oriented, rather than business oriented.

E-mail: iseneres@yahoo.com