Learning to Learn: What to Do Different in the New Modern World

by John Warner, Swamp Fox, LLC

Leonardo da Vinci lived between 1455, when Johann Gutenberg printed the first Bible with movable type, and 1517, when Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses were printed and broadly disseminated to newly literate communities across Europe. The printed word so thoroughly changed people’s view of themselves and the world that the West defines “modern” from this time of the Renaissance and the Reformation. Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1991, which is so fundamentally changing the way we perceive ourselves and relate to each other that looking back, people will define our time as the beginning of the new “modern.”

We face two immense realities. To be competitive, it used to be enough to be the best locally or regionally in something customers care about. Increasingly today, you have to be the best in the world in order to be competitive. Second, there is explosive change across many disciplines. It used to be that the best proprietary research and development could be on the leading edge of change. Today, we’ll either learn to ride the global tsunami of knowledge creation, or get washed away by it.

Recently I attended a statewide meeting of the South Carolina Council on Competitiveness. The next morning I met with the president of my local economic development organization, who asked, “Did they tell you how to actually do any of the things they are suggesting?” Later that day, I met with the director of external research at a global corporation with facilities in my town, who asked, “How do we get the people that work in my company to see that buying into this will actually make their jobs easier?”

Both friends were really asking, “How do we learn to do different in the new modern world?”

The intersection of disciplines

I’m not an economic developer by profession, but a businessman seeking opportunities to make money. So where do I learn about opportunities? Frans Johansson studied the patrons of the Italian Renaissance and wrote in his book, “The Medici Effect:”

The intersection of disciplines or cultures is a vibrant place for creativity because bringing together very different concepts from very different fields sets off an explosion of ideas. Quantity of ideas leads to quality of ideas. Innovators don’t produce because they are successful; they are successful because they produce.

In 2001, I began calling meetings of my friends in industry and academia, which since have evolved into an annual conference called InnoVenture. I went to the major economic anchors in my community of Greenville, S.C. – Michelin, Milliken (one of the largest privately held textile and chemical manufacturers in the world), Clemson, the University of South Carolina, the Savannah River National Lab and others – and asked a few straight-forward questions. If a “Community of Innovation” were to grow up around you, what would you want it to look like? What talent do you need? What innovations are important to you? What specialized facilities would you like access to? What kinds of entrepreneurial companies would be strategic to you?

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