innovation
Charles Leadbeater is a leading authority on innovation and strategy, and has advisedmultinationals, cities and governments, including China. He spoke to Ann O’Dea about the art of the comeback
A Financial Times journalist in a former life, author Charles Leadbeater boasts Tony Blair among his many admirers. He has worked for the European Commission as a special adviser on competitiveness and the new economy, and as a senior adviser to several govern- ments on the rise of the knowledge-driven economy, the internet and on future strategies. He is a senior associ- ate with the influential London think tank Demos. Unsurprising then that his audience at the Dublin Chamber/Fujitsu lunch in Dublin’s Conrad Hotel in November was rapt as soon as he began to speak on the subject of ‘the comeback’. He cited Finland as a country that had managed to
turn adversity around in the Eighties and stage an impressive comeback in the Nineties.When we speak at the margins of the event I ask him if there are lessons here for Ireland, if there are parallels that can be drawn. “Well, Finland came back from the biggest economic
crisis to affect a modern democracy – including Ireland!” says Leadbeater. “Finland’s entire economic model col- lapsed in 1989. It had used its adjacency to the Soviet Union to be a route for counter-trade and access to goods for Soviets that couldn’t get them at home, and when the Soviet Union opened up, that entire model col- lapsed. Finland had no more purpose, and it was like the collapse of an entire market or industry. “It was very dramatic, very sudden, very difficult to
foresee,” he continues. “GDP fell by 25pc in a year, unemployment rose to 20pc and, of the five-star hotels in Helsinki, two of them just closed for an entire year. That was repeated throughout the economy, that kind of effect.” And how did Finland come back? “It came back
because it had something to go back to,” he says. “It had a strong forestry and basic raw materials industry, but since the Sixties it had also been investing in the future, and really seriously investing. In the Nineties it had the luck that the Nordic mobile telephone standard turned into the GSM standard, which turned into Nokia’s sav- iour. Nokia, which had been on the verge of being sold to
Ericsson, then became this kind of great cash cow.” Ireland hasn’t achieved the holy grail of a Nokia, but Leadbeater points out that it was not the only factor involved. “It wasn’t just because of that, it was also because Finns have a huge history of co-operative endeavour in the face of crisis – which goes back a long way, at least to the SecondWorldWar – which they kind of mobilised. “And the Finns are very outward-looking. I mean they’re very collaborative and cooperative and in some ways closed, but they’re also very inquisitive, they’re very, very open to the world and they came back because they did something that caught the wave of growth.”
Lessons from Finland Does he see parallels for a small country like Ireland? “Well, I don’t know if there are parallels but there are lessons, yeah,” he says. “One lesson is you can only come back if you recognise the seriousness of the crisis and if you act decisively. I think a crucial component of it is you have to share the costs really fairly. I don’t think there’s any kind of solution that doesn’t. “You also have to create a story – a sort of win-win
story. I don’t think there are any economic comebacks that don’t have a real win-win kind of component to them. To do that you need to connect with what people need: you have to do something that people really need and that there’s a market and demand for. And in Ireland’s case, that can only be about looking outward.” Leadbeater cites the example of IBM’s comeback.
“Take how IBM came back from the collapse of the mainframe market and its strategic failure to make the most of its own technologies, and how it turned that around and turned itself into a software company. “There were lots of other computer companies at the
time of IBM that didn’t come back, by and large because they didn’t recognise the scale of the crisis and they became very inward-looking. The more that happened, the more sectarian they became and the more they just argued with one another. They are the mistakes.”
Winter 2010 Irish Director 43
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