What breeds innovation?
I know for sure these are not innovative:
The way an egg is fried by my mum every morning is not innovative.
Wearing a Uniqlo shirt and a pair of khaki pants that you see ten other men wear in your company's canteen is not innovative.
The method most people use to solve the same kind of problem is not innovative.
So, basically, following the "norm" is automatically anti-innovative. Innovation has to be the exception. It has to be non-mainstream and is one out of many that was never thought of or practiced by the majority, but, when it is known or made available to people, it receives an extraordinary level of acceptance. Steve Jobs did not ask customers how they wished their cellphones to be like; he created a phone that no one had ever imagined before but almost everyone was drawn to it when it was first announced in 2007.
Training is about following norms, at least this is what our school system has been doing to our kids. The school starts at 8am. All kids get into the classroom, do the same thing, switch to another subject, do the same thing, switch to another task, do the same thing. If the kids deviate from the rule, teachers complain they are not concentrating or impose a punishment to deter the kids from deviating again. Schools naturally discourage innovation. Clearly innovation is not attainable by conventional training. Rather it is a product of a culture of challenging the norm, and such culture naturally is not the norm!
If you want your kids to be innovative, you should encourage them to challenge their teachers, challenge you, deviate from the norm, think differently, insist on their own likings, avoid doing something just because everybody else is doing it, develop their own way of doing things, so much so that they become submerged in a culture of embracing non-mainstream ideas and behaviors.
I have heard loads of theories from "innovative" educators about how to teach students to be more innovative. Key words like "creative thinking", "divergent thinking", "innovative problem solving" are all over the place in Hong Kong's education industry. Maybe these theories really work, but at the end the system that implements them often requires convergence to a norm. Worse still, the first routine question our Chinese parents ask their children when they are home after school is: 「今天在學校有沒有好好聽老師的話？」(Literally "Did you follow the teachers' instruction and behave well today?") The question expects an answer that again is strictly the bloody norm!
November 2014