Learning to be innovative in a competitive 
world 
David White 
1. Creativity and innovation 
People have always been creative. What we know today is built on what we learned from 
others. We stand on the shoulders of preceding generations. 
But human society has not always been innovative. For thousands of years humans learned, 
without this leading to systematic economic application. 
William Baumol has told us that the Romans new about the steam engine, but did nothing 
with it. The Chinese new about gunpowder and made fireworks. The Middle Ages knew of 
the principles of crop rotation, but did not apply them. It was only after thousands of years 
with the real economic income of most people bumping along at a level determined by 
subsistence that, from the end of the 18th century, western economies started to innovate. 
That is to say, we started to apply human creativity to the economic system. The results have 
been astonishing. Today in the west, we are 20 times richer than our ancestors were 200 years 
ago. The credit goes to the market economy, the system that rewards those who innovate. 
Innovation, that has made us materially rich, also holds the key to some of our major 
economic challenges. Innovations that enable us to reduce our demands on the environment 
have never been more urgently needed. 
Innovation affects our competitiveness, for firms compete in global markets more on the basis 
of their capacity to innovate than on the basis of price. The Lisbon agenda has reminded us 
that our competitiveness affects both the availability of jobs and our capacity to meet altruistic 
social ambitions on such issues as health care, social protection, pensions and education. 
We are in the most serious economic crisis any of us can remember. Was it not innovation in 
financial markets that got us into this mess? 
Innovation can be misused. Market signals can fail, be suppressed or be ignored, with 
disastrous effect. 
But innovation, properly handled, is still the only way to sustainable economic recovery. 
As the world’s economies struggle to right themselves and to recover their economic growth, 
those who are uncompetitive will suffer worst; will be slowest to recover; and will be mired 
for longer. 
Innovation, properly handled, is still the only way to sustainable economic recovery. We 
never needed innovation more than we do now. 
2. The innovative process 
Innovation is not the inevitable result of new knowledge. Millennia of un-innovative 
creativity demonstrated that. 
Innovation comes form the interaction of entrepreneurship and knowledge. Without both, it 
will not happen. 
When an entrepreneur looks at a market and says, If I could do that, the market would reward 
me, we have a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for innovation – the knowing what. 
When the entrepreneur meets the engineer who says I know how to do what you want, we 
have the second necessary but not sufficient condition for innovation – the knowing how. 
Innovation depends on knowing what and knowing how. It is impossible to say which 
comes first. Sometimes one, sometimes the other. But only when the two come together is 
there potential for innovation. 
Even then, there may not be sufficient conditions for innovation. Innovation needs finance, it 
needs marketing and production, it may need authorisation and so on. All these must be 
added. 
There is another determining condition for innovation: market success. History is littered 
with wonderful ideas that failed the market test. Like the betting man, who always knows the 
horses that should have won. The only test that matters is the test of the market. The market 
test distinguishes interesting ideas from successful innovations. 
3. Discourse, creativity and innovation 
The philosophical analysis of language, discourse and its interpretation can help us understand 
the processes of creativity and innovation. It can help us to see more clearly something we 
already partially understood. 
Philosophers have often tried to develop grand schemes to explain everything. The results are 
disappointing. So it is with rationalism. The hunt for perfect knowledge, to which it urges us, 
turns out to be a chimera. We explain one problem only to find another lurking behind it. 
Some philosophers have sought another way forward through the analysis of language. For it 
is certainly through language that we discover and communicate most of what we know. 
Without language, human society would be very primitive indeed. 
Aristotle, in his Poetics, draws attention to the importance of mimesis, which can be loosely 
translated as imitation. But it is not just copying: rather, it is a re-describing of something in a 
way that reaches towards its essence. Mimesis simplifies experience and in doing so, it also 
reveals it. 
Aritotle see mimesis in literature, in music, dance, painting, sculpture and drama. He believes 
that it is fundamental to the way we learn. So painting reconstructs reality on the basis of a 
limited set of conventions. In doing so, it reveals reality. 
Tragedy presents someone’s undeserved misfortune and evokes our pity. But through mimesis 
it provides a narrative structure that distances us from the painful experience and so enables 
us to draw knowledge, consolation and insight from it. Mimesis brings us close enough to 
reality to empathise, but keeps us sufficiently distanced to be able to observe it and reflect on 
it with detachment. 
It has been said that an unskilled photograph captures everything, but yields nothing. A 
drawing by Picasso, made up of a few lines, yields far more. Part of its secret is that it 
engages the viewer to fill in the detail. 
4. In the use of language, we can create surplus of meaning 
Mimesis points to the creative possibilities of art forms. One of these is language, especially 
poetic language. We develop our creativity in language: not just in words and sentences, but 
in narratives, stories, history and even in fiction. We use figures of speech, metaphors, 
symbols. 
Paul Ricoeur has explained how, in doing so, we have the capacity to develop new meaning. 
Take as an example our use of the metaphor. A metaphor juxtaposes two concepts in a way 
that leads to the transfer of information from one to the other. 
If I say that I saw my friend come down the hill on his bicycle as fast as a bullet, that would 
be a simile. It hardly changes the meaning. 
But if I say that my friend on his bicycle is a bullet, that is a metaphor. It invites the listener to 
transfer meaning from the idea of a bullet to their picture of my friend. So the listener could 
understand that he was going fast; that it was dangerous, even potentially lethal, to get in his 
way; that there was little hope of him turning corners; that I did not hear him until after he 
was past. In fact, the transfer of meaning is limited only by the apposite nature of the 
metaphor and the listener’s capacity for invention. My friend received a terrific push at the 
start and then was in free flight; he was spinning as he came… 
The meaning is not limited to the information put in by the speaker. New meaning is also 
generated by the listener. There is meaning on both sides. As Aristotle says, metaphors teach 
us new things. Ricoeur calls this "surplus of meaning". 
By re-describing our world with language, especially language that is poetic in character, we 
can appropriate new visions of our world, and so gain meaning. 
Our personal life-narratives, our recounting of cultural stories, our histories, even our fiction 
do the same. 
A famous example of narrative that generates surplus of meaning is in Jesus’ use of parables. 
Instead of being simply declaratory in answering questions, Jesus often uses parables, and 
leaves it to the listener to generate the answer. The method has been remarkably successful. 
People are still drawing fresh insights from his parables 2000 years later and in quite different 
contexts. 
All discourse calls for interpretation. By interpreting what he hears or reads, the hearer opens 
up new possibilities, new worlds that may not have been seen by the speaker. Interpretation 
invites us first to visualise new worlds, and then to want to place ourselves in them. 
One of my daughters, when she was about 10 years old, read a famous children’s novel Anne 
of Green Gables. She said, with childish transparency, I wish I was Anne of Green Gables. 
We have all shared that experience. Language has opened up a world that we can envisage 
and where we say, I can see myself in that world, even I want to bring that world about. 
What applies to poetry and narrative applies equally, if less obviously, to our business 
projects, our innovative plans and approaches. The interaction between entrepreneur and 
engineer, between venture capitalist and entrepreneur, calls forth new ideas, generated by the 
listener, that were not envisaged by the speaker. 
The entrepreneur is more likely to provoke surplus of meaning from the interpretation given 
by the engineer by using language that invites creative response. Ricoeur would call that 
language poetic, but he does not mean that it is poetry. Rather that it stimulates, invites and 
even requires interpretation, envisioning, appropriation. 
discourse are in some way remote from the listener. We come to any discourse with 
prejudices and pre-conceptions. If the world of the discourse sounds familiar, it is all too easy 
to slip it into our already existing categories, without much thought. On the other hand, a 
classical text, originating in circumstances far from my knowledge, requires an effort from me 
to enter into the world of the text and so helps me break away from the prejudices of my 
present circumstances. A discourse expressed by someone who is trained in a discipline 
different from mine (as is often the case between an entrepreneur and an engineer) demands 
an effort of interpretation that breaks away from my starting points. 
Discourse is not one-way and nor is interpretation. It is circular and can be iterative, 
stimulating a dialectic that generates new ideas, new insights, new vision. New worlds in 
which I am motivated to take part. The possibility to enter into experience that otherwise 
belongs to someone else. 
An article in Nursing Inquiry 
1
 has demonstrated how this can be applied to first person 
accounts of people living with muscular dystrophy. This is a progressive wasting disease that 
affects young people and attacks their motor capacity. They need wheelchairs, then 
mechanical ventilation. First person accounts are emotionally charged and hard to interpret. 
By converting them into texts that consciously used poetic language, it was possible for 
researchers to interpret creatively, but still in a way that was defensible. Further, by enabling 
the researcher to envisage their own participation in the described situation, it enabled them to 
develop nursing care that more adequately responded to real patient need. Ricoeur calls this 
new insight into being-in-the-world. It is a change in the hearer, not in the speaker. 
For Ricoeur, this is part of surplus of meaning. We might call it added value. 
Creativity depends not just on speaking, but on listening: not just on writing but on reading. It 
depends on a sufficient distance between the speaker and the listener, so that the speaker does 
not kill the listener’s interpretation of the discourse, snuff out any emerging new worlds at 
birth, but lets the listener develop his own picture, his own vision. 
Creativity comes in allowing my experience to interact with your experience, on my 
permitting you to interpret, to draw new meaning from my words. This may even be meaning 
that I did not intend to put there. Any attempt in my discourse to dominate or to master you 
will only crush creativity. For me to gain from having spoken, I must be prepared to listen, for 
it is in listening that value is added. 
In this dialectic of discourse, creativity takes place, innovation can be stimulated. 
5. Education, training and innovation 
Education and training can help make society innovative. We need 3 headline changes of 
emphasis. Happily, our education systems are already committed to making them happen. 
First, that our education systems need to work on establishing competences from a very early 
age. Early education is about acquiring competence more than knowledge. Competence 
includes such fields as social, emotional, physical, numeracy, cognitive competence. If these 
are established early, they can be used. If they are not established early it becomes very 
difficult to add them. 
Second, education and training needs to work in terms of learning outcomes, not of learning 
inputs. What matters after education is what the student knows, understands and can do. This 
affirms the student’s right to interpret. A system focused on what knowledge the teacher has 
chosen to impart denies the right to interpret. 
Third, education needs to be student lead. It is the students that do education, not the teachers. 
Student-led education helps make confident, self-assured people who believe in themselves 
and their ideas and are unafraid of discussion. 
Working out these changes will take time, as will the Bologna process and instruments such 
as the European Qualifications Framework, ECTS and ECVET: assessment systems for 
informal and non-formally acquired knowledge: quality assurance. These are becoming 
understood: but implementation will take time. 
6. Conclusion 
When an entrepreneur pitches for finance, she has an average of one minute to interest the 
venture capitalist. 
In one minute it is impossible to explain all the details, background, already resolved 
technicalities of the project. An attempt to do so, to convince the venture capitalist that every 
problem has been thought of, is destined to fail. 
The challenge is to present a discourse that engages the creative capacity of the venture 
capitalist; that causes him to envisage new worlds in which he can imagine himself; hardest of 
all, that stimulates the venture capitalist to want to bring those worlds into being; that is the 
challenge. 
Does our education system yet prepare its students for that poetic challenge? 
1
Distanciation in Ricoeur’s theory of interpretation: narrations in a study of life experiences of 
living with chronic illness and home mechanical ventilation. Pia Sander Dreyer and Birthe D 
Pedersen: Nursing Inquiry 2009 
About the author 
David White 
EU Fellow 
European University Institute, Florence