What's President Park's problem?

By Jason Lim

A recent editorial in these very pages complained that President Park’s “creative economy” appears to be more a campaign buzzword than a fully defined policy direction.

At least creative economy is better named than the newly-created Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, for which Park should have gotten more grief. With a name like that, no wonder the first nominee refused the position. After all, who but the Pope can take on the responsibility of creating the future? Perhaps the Dalai Lama will work as his deputy and fill in when the Pope is feeling non-miraculous.

All kidding aside, President Park did hint that a creative economy will be built on two pillars of science and technology and information communication. With that hint, the picture starts becoming clearer. Creative economy is basically one that relies on innovation to drive new markets and growth. And since these two pillars already provide much of the strength to Korea’s economy, it makes sense to rely on them; the whole Korean economic house is already built on them anyway.

The problem with innovation is that it’s almost as vague as creative. Innovation is just another buzzword that sounds more legitimate and substantive when used in a business or economic context just because it’s more familiar. And because it’s so vague, innovation means different things to different people depending on the problem that they are trying to solve.

Which is exactly the point. Innovation is essentially about solving problems. To put it another way, it’s about using different combinations of people, process, and technology to find workable solutions to a problem. So, what’s the problem that President Park is trying to solve? Unless you have a well-defined and specifically scoped problem statement, you won’t be able to develop a policy solution to address it, no matter what catchy slogans you use. Even Albert Einstein agrees: “If I were given one hour to save the planet, I would spend 59 minutes defining the problem and one minute resolving it.”

Defining a problem isn’t as easy as it sounds, however. We often don’t know what the problem is. We usually have a nebulous idea of what we think is wrong and how it should actually work, but we haven’t articulated our vague sense of wrongness into concrete bits of problems that can be tackled and fed into a comprehensive solution. Without a clear sense of the problem, buzzwords such as creative economy and “economic democratization” are ghost solutions looking for a problem. No wonder Park is having such a difficult time defending them because there is no substance to defend in the first place.

What the President needs right now is a robust and disciplined process for defining the problem to the solutions that she already proposed. Dwayne Spradlin, the president and CEO of Innocentive, spells out a useful framework for defining the problem when trying to innovate your way to a solution.

His problem definition process has four steps:

First, clarify the internal or external need for a solution.

Secondly, articulate the strategic importance of the solution to the firm (in this case, South Korea).

Thirdly, research how the firm (South Korea) and other organizations (other nations) have already tried to solve the problem.

Lastly, create a clear and complete description of the problem.

Once you have a clear problem statement, then it becomes much easier to engage the policymakers and other stakeholders in a conversation with a clear end goal that can result in a policy. However, that’s not the end. There are two important potholes that President Park needs to stay away from when driving on the Creative Economy road.

One, thinking that the government can, by itself, innovate a solution to the problem that it just defined. The government’s job is to define the problem at a macro level and create an encouraging political and socioeconomic environment. It’s really the private sector’s job to drive that process forward and experiment with workable solutions and prototypes. In other words, government should stay away from running things on its own. Government should regulate while the private sector operates.

Two, not all solutions are technical solutions. This is an easy trap to fall into in Korea since so much of the recent economic success depended on incremental innovation in technology. But technology is just one part of any systemic solution. It’s not the magic bullet. To borrow an analogy, if all you have is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail.

Since a system consists of people, process, and technology, the former two must be considered integral as well. As for people, you can’t dial up more creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship with a lever. You have to inspire, lead, and educate. And for processes, inefficiencies must be tightened and outdated process must be modernized ― this has to do with how we work, not necessarily what we work with.

But first things first. And that’s to ask: What’s your problem, President Park?

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C., based expert on innovation, engagement and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. He can be reached at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook/jasonlim2000 and @jasonlim2012.