“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s coming attractions,” Albert Einstein
In the global war for talent, quality human capital is harder to come by than any other capital asset. In that regard, the sheer physical size of a nation does not necessarily matter.
By any obvious measure, Goliath (in the Old Testament) should have torn David into bits; but the shepherd boy had a skill, a drive, and an instinct for survival; all that made the difference in the shepherd subduing the giant in a flash. The readiness is all!
An ethos of educational excellence is available to any country – big or small, and can be developed. But transformation for quality and access is a key ingredient through the examples set by Finland, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, etc. Those very small countries have deployed a great effort to nurture and sustain their great expectations.
As endorsed by Kwame Nkrumah for Ghana and Africa decades ago, “We need thinkers; thinkers of great thoughts. We need doers; doers of great deeds.” Similarly, Franklin D. Roosevelt observed, “New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered [with] vision, boldness, and drive [we] can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and more fruitful life.”
A visionary strategy for a desired role in the world must define the national policy to move any educational agenda. Policy educators, for example, have to establish ongoing links between learning and purpose.
Typically, at the university level, students are exposed to a range of ideas and examples for appreciation, reflection, emulation, and action. And, as often as possible, it is better that each person (or teams of like-minded people) picks a particular interest out of that wide universe, personalize it, act upon it, and own it.
Harvard’s Innovation Lab (Hi, or i-lab, for short) is an idea whose time has come. One of its objectives is to create “a bridge between imagination and implementation”.
Situated on the first floor of the Batten Hall on the Harvard Business School campus, the i-lab is intended to build an innovative community link between neighborhood entrepreneurs, students, and faculty by providing a collaborative space to meet for energizing new thinking and applications.
Some organizations – including the Small Business Administration (SBA), Centre for Women & Enterprise, Massachusetts Small Business Development Center Network, etc – have committed to one-on-one coaching and business advising, workshops, and training sessions in the i-lab.
According to the past Harvard President Drew Faust, “Creating a better-connected and more collaborative Harvard is one of my highest goals for the University. The i-lab is a place where we can begin to realize that goal. Here, aspiring and established innovators, mentors, and networkers from across our campus will gather under a single roof and use knowledge to create a future that none of us can imagine.”
The future is created by inventing it. No other future is promised on the horizon. The need to grow and manage one’s own abilities is creating unimaginable intellectual, economic and entrepreneurial leaps like never before.
Today, questions that have never been asked before, products that have never been made before, and services that have never been provided before may guide the answers for self-fulfillment, productivity, and global progress.
In a nutshell, without probing where we could go, nations get stuck in the passive mode. As corroborated by Albert Einstein, “The important thing is [to not stop] questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”
Everyone is entitled to think their own good work, and in the way they do it best. And collaboration between the right people may provide the ability to think outside the confines of traditional disciplines and bureaucracies. It means getting people to re-engage, to re-think, to re-design, and re-produce innovative things or services.
Learners need to see why they are learning what they are learning, and also how the learning can be useful quickly; but the easier way for the youth to understand all this is to relate the learning processes in the context of what they themselves crave and perceive as lifelong, fulfilling needs.
It is through the visions of the young people brimming with talent and energy and hope that a better nation can be created, as Barack Obama remarked on his visit to Ghana.
Many countries are seriously converting their schools from mediocrity into excellence, from staleness into innovations; they are set to plant and harvest their own talent by motivating their own potential stock of leaders, thinkers, and entrepreneurs.
Dynamic attitudes foster such aims. Smart, sophisticated, and globally savvy people are the sine qua non of the business world.
Harvard’s i-lab embraces the idea of shared vision and innovation, with the goal of rescuing students from “siloed” or isolated departments, and encouraging them to mingle, and possibly join up in new ventures with key people in various industries.
Human capital is the primary key to a nation’s success, and collaborative linkages are meaningful strategies for the future.