Boosting Indonesia’s Innovation
There is almost no educational program to increase creativity. Thus, two things that are urgently needed in our education are to push for the even distribution of education and to stimulate creativity.
The article by Agus Suwignyo (Kompas, 10/1/2023) expresses his uneasiness as an academic who still possesses the passion to improve the discouraging condition of our education.
There are not many people like Agus Suwignyo today who are concerned about the ongoing situation, in which pragmatism pervades among almost all decision-makers. One of his concerns that has awakened me is the future of research universities.
Where will the research universities be taken under the Kampus Merdeka (Independent Campus) program, with its pragmatic and vocational views? What about researches on archeology, philosophy, history, Javanese literature, and others that are far from industry? I feel uneasy myself, probably because of my background as a proponent of theoretical physics.
This pragmatic view is beginning to cast a pervasive shadow over the academic environment. Some have started to point to the term research university as the antithesis of “innovation university”, with the pragmatic understanding that research universities produce papers published in journals, while innovation universities produce outputs that can directly enter the industrial world.
Also read:
> Sustainability of ‘Independent Campus’
> ‘Independent Campus’ Jolts National Education
In fact, such an assumption seems to stem from misunderstanding about what “innovation” means. Innovation is being solely defined as something that generates direct economic benefits. This definition does not touch the true essence of innovation, because true innovation requires the generation of something new, or novelty, based on research.
In terms of research, while we know that our higher education institutions always rank below universities in neighboring countries, it also turns out that our innovation index ranking is also not encouraging. The 2022 Global Innovation Index (GII) ranks Indonesia 75th out of 132 countries, below the Philippines (50th), Vietnam (48th), Thailand (43rd), Malaysia (36th) and Singapore (7th).
There seems to have been some improvement because in the 2021 GII, we ranked 87th. However, we still ranked below the Philippines (51st), Vietnam (44th), Thailand (43rd), Malaysia (36th) and Singapore (8th). What happened to our country in comparison with our neighbors?
Definition of “innovation”
The definition of innovation is definitely not unique. A definition that can satisfy all seems impossible. In fact, innovators, motivators, and book authors have their own definitions. What if we run a Google search? This doesn't help, because it turns out hits to more than 4 billion websites. How about a dictionary? It’s most likely outdated.
Perhaps a fairly good definition is the version given by a motivator named Nick Skillicorn on his website, Idea to Value. This site presents the results of interviews with 26 innovation experts, including public speakers, motivators, and authors of books on innovation. Still, we find that they differ in their definitions. These definitions were then analyzed and synthesized into a single definition. Not all statements were definitions that deserved analyzing, such as Stefan Lindegaard's responses: "I try not to define innovation" and "Stop talking about innovation". These were definitely left out of the equation.
Two important points emerged from all definitions of innovation, which were “having a useful new idea and “executing that idea”. These two notions led to the final definition: "Innovation entails an execution of an idea that addresses specific challenges with its generated value meriting the company and its customers.”
This definition, in my opinion, is incomplete because it fails to include the notion of "having an idea" for its execution. Thus, I believe that the definition of innovation is: "Having a useful new idea and being able to execute it to generate added value for mankind and the environment."
Because the required condition to generate new ideas is creativity, it is obvious that only creative nations are generally innovative.
The Idea to Value website notes that only 4 percent of innovations have turned a profit. The rest, or 96 percent, has come to naught!
Global Innovation Index
This definition of innovation implies that the ideal innovation index should be a parameter that measures innovation thoroughly, from the very start of an idea being put forward to the point that new idea generates economic benefits. Conceding that there is no single practicable parameter, the GII uses seven assessment parameters, which are institutions, human capital and research, infrastructure, market sophistication, business sophistication, knowledge and technology outputs, and creative outputs.
Uniquely, out of these seven parameters, five refer to inputs and only two to outputs. Therefore, countries that opt for a shortcut, ambitious to engage in expected innovations without improving resources and not heeding research development, will struggle to climb up the GII ladder. These seven parameters comprise 81 indicators. Different from its 2021 report, the GII does not explicitly provide a computation of these indicators in its 2022 report.
Ranking 75th out of 132 countries, we are clearly below the median (66). Except for market sophistication (36), our scores in the other parameters are all below the median. The two lowest-scored parameters that are currently the government's biggest challenges are human capital and research (90) and business sophistication (92).
In the human capital parameter, the assessment covers the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) allocated to education, our students' literacy scores in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the number of postgraduate students in science and engineering, the percentage of GDP spent on research, and the Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) university rankings. In business sophistication, the assessment covers skills-based workers, university-industry collaboration, and the use of scientific knowledge.
Also read:
Many may think that we lack these collaborations. However, the GII 2021 ranked Indonesia 27th in this indicator, well above the median! In fact, the GII provided notes on our university-industry collaborations, referring to it as the nation’s strength and putting Indonesia on par with the group of countries that earn the largest GDP. This was surprising, given that our academics have been accused of sitting back, too preoccupied with theories and papers.
Our students’ PISA literacy scores have exposed a chronic problem. We have been languishing at the bottom of the list and have hardly moved up all this time, despite what we have learned about our students frequently winning gold medals at international Olympiads. Where does the problem lie? The quality of our education is not evenly distributed. The students sent to the Olympics are our best students, while those surveyed by PISA also include others.
How about our science and technology outputs? Of course, we do not deserve to be proud because we rank 78th, while Malaysia and Thailand are 39th and 43rd, respectively. The Philippines even ranks 41st. However, there is something interesting about this parameter, namely that one of the drawbacks contributing to this low-performing parameter comes from an indicator on the low number of scientific articles per GDP. The GII 2021 ranked Indonesia 128th, which exposed Indonesia’s weakness, both as a state and as a country with a large GDP.
What to fix?
I really find it fun to watch the innovation programs on Deutsche Welle TV. It shows that innovation is everywhere, from kitchens to laboratories and from backyards to large-scale farms. Innovation is not the privilege of scientists or industrial engineers. It belongs to every creative human being. Innovation must be pursued in all sectors.
Innovation as defined above requires us to improve our performance in all indicators, from the upstream to the downstream. In the upstream, creativity is the main source of ideas for innovation. The use of junior high school students' PISA scores as inputs for assessing innovation clearly indicates that improvements must start early and not be done just at the end of formal education, at universities.
Here, we see a flaw in our education. There is almost no educational program to increase creativity. Thus, two things that are urgently needed in our education are to push for the even distribution of education and to stimulate creativity.
There is almost no educational program to increase creativity.
Finally, the parameters of institutions, science and technology outputs and creative outputs must also be improved. The government has a very large role the institutions parameter covers politics, regulation and business as sub-parameters.
Meanwhile, the science and technology outputs, which include the sub-parameters of knowledge creation, knowledge impact, and knowledge diffusion, requires the empowerment of our scientific and industrial communities.
Even though GII 2021 ranks Indonesia 27th in university-industry collaborations, the final products of these collaborations still need further intervention from the government for our industry to become more “patriotic” by using the nation’s creativity. In the last parameter, namely creative output, which includes services, products and digitalization, Indonesia shows great potential for performing well, because I view the diverse cultures and talents we have to be very promising in this regard.
Terry Mart
Terry Mart, University of Indonesia (UI) physicist and member of the Indonesian Academy of Sciences (AIPI)
This article was translated by Musthofid.
