UNITED NATIONS - / MaximsNews Network / 16 March 2010 --Thought starters based on the powerful ideas expressed by Vice-Premier Zhang Dejiang through an exploration of the questions defined by China's State Administration Foreign Experts Affairs (SAFEA).

 

"More attention to Human and Intellectual Resource Development" Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang, 2009 CIEP, Shenzen November 7, 2009

 

What approaches can China take to strengthen the development of human and intellectual resources and capital building?  

To pursue a strategy to strengthen the development of human and intellectual resources and capital involves developing a new paradigm – one that brings together diverse sources of ideas, information and expertise to foster a creative commons for knowledge exchange, an enhanced learning environment and an ecosystem for innovation.

As a starting point, it seems essential to recognize that required policy development must start from the premise that there is no single way to identify a challenge or opportunity

Research shows that it is important to

- acknowledge and accept the value and the limits of existing solutions

- proactively foster the emergence of solutions from different sources  

- ensure that power -responsibility, authority and resources- is distributed to people who can solve an issue most effectively

    - refuse to be diverted and learn from both failure and success 

Probing deeply into the requirement to achieve "Xiaokang” and China ’s vision of a harmonious society, it becomes clear that there is a need to build a knowledge society and within it a knowledge economy. This knowledge intensiveness must be continuously supported by the tools, the skills the political will and the wisdom to foster the general and sustainable well being of all people by contributing to disruptive change and an accelerated pace of technical and scientific advances, that implies a clear commitment to universal values and a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources.

The economic and social imperatives for continuous, accelerated, more extensive and more inclusive human and intellectual resource development are growing more urgent just as the primary means to achieve them come under threat. This means that two vital public policy aspirations are in jeopardy: the need to give more people the opportunity to access lifelong learning regardless of background, and the needs of China to become a global centre of innovation in the knowledge economy.

To resolve these issues it is vital that China maintain focus on its vision that the development of human and intellectual resources is central not only to the economic development of the country but above all to the development of a truly sustainable harmonious society.

To accomplish this, it seems that China must not only continue to ensure that sufficient resources, incentives and support are available as well as approaches driven by people finding new ways to develop, access and use new ideas and knowledge, by establishing new networks of learning and innovation, and by collaborative research networks that span institutions and businesses.

China has impressive resources available for deployment to accelerate the development of its human and intellectual capital – great universities, research institutes, think tanks and long established links between societal sectors.  China is in an ideal position to leverage the “network” factor in order to multiply and compound the impact of these resources and extend their reach to the four corners of the nation and to the powerful Chinese Diaspora that extends to the four corners of the globe. And in so doing making opportunity more available and taping the full resources of the Chinese people.  

This is about building “open platforms” for exploration, learning and connecting diverse institutions to foster collaboration and shared learning.  It is also about bringing together diverse disciplines to tackle difficult problems in order to foster a diversity of viewpoints leading to innovative approaches to problem solving and scientific advancement.

However, it is important to recognize that innovation is a collaborative process that does not recognize borders and is stifled by barriers. While some countries might be tempted to gain competitive advantage in this area, optimum development can only be achieved through open platforms and collaboration.

So while it is important that the networks are attractive to all Chinese, it is vital that they not only be open to but enticing, welcoming, challenging and rewarding to people and institutions around the world.

Research confirms that we must avoid isolationism, imperialism and an over-emphasis on short term pragmatism and focus on collaboration and complementarism. This means that great efforts must be made to integrate short term imperatives with long term objective and remove hard and soft barriers and explore ever more effective approaches to ensure the free and rapid flow of information while ensuring that moral values and the stability so essential for sustainable development are safeguarded.

China has the political will, the experience and is incessantly using and further developing the needed tools to foster innovative approaches to learning, research and collaboration.  Driven by the compound and inter-supportive impact of scientific advances and the demand for the sharing of information and ideas, communication technology is expanding at unprecedented rates. The spread of Internet access, broadband and cloud-computing, the growth of social networking and the development of ‘collaborative’ tools have been connecting people in new ways. This new connectivity has resulted in self-expression, conversation and creation on an unprecedented scale and provides a powerful and dynamic platform to encourage and facilitate collaboration and are driving, scientific, technical economic and social innovation.

In this, SAFEA appears to have a unique opportunity to facilitate and accelerate such trends and develop a new paradigm for academic collaboration, knowledge exchange and learning programmes.  This is about leveraging tools and technologies to strengthen the collaborative process and create new platforms, programmes and channels for sharing, learning and accessing and distributing knowledge from global partners. These are also tools for increasing access to the latest research and knowledge as well as enlarging the community of China institutions, scholars and students that can access these ideas.  Moreover, these are technologies that can enable greater levels of cooperation and expand the level and quality of face to face and on-line exchange of ideas and networking between scholars and practitioners that leads to deeper knowledge and innovation.

Perhaps the initial steps could be exploratory: identifying and prompting global best practices in utilizing these communication and networking technologies to facilitate knowledge exchange, networking and partnership development.  SAFEA is also in a position to promote the building of an infrastructure of collaboration and distributed learning. There should be a nurturing of demonstration projects that exploit these peer-networking, distance bridging and community building technologies and which encourage China ’s institutions to develop world-changing models for accelerating and expanding real- time access to knowledge centers and scientific expertise world-wide.

"More attention to the quality building of international exchange and cooperation" Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang, 2009 CIEP, Shenzen November 7, 2009

How to approach the quality building of international cooperation in human and intellectual resources?

An essential aspect for the construction of quality relationships for international exchange and cooperation is the building of strength though diversity.  It is by bringing together and forging a critical mass of diverse ideas, knowledge-bases, life perspectives and scientific disciplines that learning networks can be created to generate new knowledge and fresh perspectives on old problems as well as the recognition of new challenges and opportunities.

Knowledge or more precisely new knowledge that is applied or utilized is the stuff of innovation. Knowledge generation and knowledge sharing are essential.

A nation or a society is not a passive repository of knowledge. Multiple knowledge nodes interact and recombine with each other with varying intensity, get converted from one form to the other and mobilize, recombine and transform the resources of the society as to add value. What results from these re-combinations and transformations is the new knowledge which underpins innovation.

In working towards this, perhaps “dominant logic” is one of the greatest barriers to overcome. Dominant logic is understood as a knowledge structure and a set of processes which are seen as resulting from the reinforcement that results from doing the ‘right things’ with respect to core challenges in a specific environment. In this interpretation of reality, this dominant logic may not only be a passive description but can be “actively imprinted upon ‘reality’ to create a fictitious rather than a real environment.

These perceptions, myths or dominant realities result in a skewed understanding of the past and more dangerously tend to create frameworks that effectively exclude the creation of scenarios for the exploration of possible futures.

 Research also shows that dominant logic is “never clearly stated but more or less seeps into the individual and collective mind-set of scientist in a discipline” . The bottom line simply stated is that dominant logic and group-think while comfortable are extremely dangerous as not only do they counter a scientific approach to development,  they impeed  paradigm shifts that can only result from proactively and boldly questions “sacred cows”.

It is clear that for the medium term, China ’s strategy is to develop leadership positions in new technologies and develop original research that puts its own “stamp” on global innovation. To do this, China should bring a similar attitude of innovation to developing its next generation of international academic and research partnerships.  The empowering theme should be innovation leadership through dynamic partnering and broadening the community of knowledge exchange and collaboration. 

China might explore leading by adopting and championing initiatives of great scientific import that will inspire its partners and enable China ’s institutions to recruit the most prominent research allies from around the world.  Around such initiatives SAFEA could recruit leadership councils of world respected experts, academics and scientists to support its programs and help design of new initiatives.  Moreover, China should look beyond attracting in-bound scholars to also helping its universities establish off shore partnerships and programs.  China should be looking to strengthen its institutions by helping them establish a presence in key knowledge centers, multiplying the opportunity for exchange and joint initiatives with local scholars, as so many other nations have done.

There is another dimension to quality building – diversifying the sources of ideas and expertise and the broadening of partnerships.  China should lead by undertaking scientific leadership initiatives which are inclusive of the institutions, perspectives and issues facing both developed and developing countries.  It is these new perspectives, and by being a voice not only for China but for developing nations and defining projects that are inclusive, China can help broaden the problem-set and solution opportunities.  In so doing, China can mobilize and support a more diverse array of talents, perspectives and ideas to address the challenges facing the world.

"More attention to the building of systems and mechanism for exchange and cooperation" Vice Premier Zhang Dejiang, 2009 CIEP, Shenzen November 7, 2009

How should China learn from the advanced experience of foreign countries to promote the building of systems and mechanisms for international exchange and cooperation in human and intellectual resources?

The wisdom in the admonition of “crossing a river by feeling the stones” applied in building of systems and mechanism for the development  of international exchange and cooperation leads to considering that one fruitful approach might be to link experiments in systems and mechanism development to very concrete challenges and opportunities.

Two landmark projects, one from the physical sciences, the “Human Genome Project” and the other from the social sciences the “United Nations Global Compact”, provide sound and interesting examples which can serve as models for critique and exploration.

Both projects were guided by clearly stated objectives which would gain further and more precise definition as the process unfolded and each was supported by a set of intertwined principles. Both projects shunned bureaucracy, hierarchical structures and rigid procedures, instead were designed, supported and governed as open platforms by multi-stakeholder networks

Both projects had champions (the Human Genome Project: James Watson and Francis Collins and the Global Compact: Kofi Annan and Georg Kell) visionaries with feet firmly planted on the ground, committed to the principles of scientific development and dedicated to contributing to a better world. Though seemingly worlds apart they shared a profound understanding that “business as usual” is not equipped to address the interrelated and dynamic challenges that face our world and especially those which confront the disadvantaged and the future generations.

While both projects had champions they were in the most practical sense possible owned by their stakeholders.

Both projects were conceived as multi/trans-disciplinary and multi/trans-sectoral – in other words not only borderless but edgeless. Essentially the projects attracted and continue to attract inputs from an ever expanding array of contributors who share the goals and understand the benefits of utilizing the open platform.  This continues to support and nourish a “virtuous spiral” that ensures the ongoing and escalating interaction of knowledge contributors and knowledge users.

Relevance and quality are assured not by some central function but rather by more powerful, more eclectic, more objective ongoing specific peer and overall stakeholder review.

China has taken important roles in and made significant contributions to both projects and in turn has and continues to reap significant benefits from this engagement. The United Nations Global Compact was championed in China by the United Work Department of the CPC: Mr. Wang Zhaoguo, Mrs. Liu Yandong, Mr Hu Deping, China Enterprise Confederation: Mr. Chen Jinhua and by leaders of the business community such as the late Mr. Jing Shuping, Mr. Huang Mengfu, Mr. Cheng Yuan, Capt Wei Jiafu and China’s great contribution to the Human Genome Project by the Beijing Genomics Institute: Prof. Yang Huanming These champions not only provided the impetus in China, guidance in ensuring that the projects also were in harmony with China’s realities and vision but also stimulated China’s contribution to the internal effort.

In their own way, both the Human Genome Project and the Global Compact have not only changed the world but continue to provide an effective, dynamic mechanism for exchange and cooperation.

Therefore, one area that China might consider in its efforts to promote the development of international exchange and cooperation could be in the area of defining, championing and supporting specific large significant breakthrough projects that are tailored to attract a wide and highly diverse array of the world’s best thinkers, explorers, practitioners, and especially younger contributors who live in a borderless universe, do not accept the limitations imposed by silos and are prepared to invest and innovate.

There are of course a great number of high significance challenges that must be addressed on a global basis and many directly affect China. Organizations such as SAFEA can play a vital role in helping identify key issues and encouraging appropriate champions to step forward. At the same time, SAFEA should continue to challenge China ’s institutions to develop their world class capacities while fostering an attitude of innovation and international cooperation.  

- Fred Dubee is a Special  Advisor to United Nations Global Compact and Associate Director, Asia Research Centre for the Global Compact. He  is Executive Director (International) Global Management Development Institute, Shanghai University. Teaches at the University of Basel: World Peace Academy, Shanghai University and Transcend University. He is Professor (hc) at the Beijing Genomics Institute and a Senior Advisor to the China Center for International Economic Exchanges and the State Administration for Foreign Expert Affairs.

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