Japanese Lessons for Cooperative Extension

A growing number of Japanese entrepreneurs, whether consciously or unconsciously, grasp the fact that building platforms and ecosystems lies at the heart of efforts to return Japan to the front ranks of technological innovation.

How does an article about a Japanese company’s decision to adopt English as its official business language possibly relate the future of Cooperative Extension?

Short answer: In every conceivable way.

The scramble by this company and many other companies around the globe to embrace English underscores why we must understand the absolutely indispensable role platforms and ecosystems will play in our future.

An article published in the Harvard Business Review titled “Global Business Speaks English,” related why the Japanese Company, Rakuten, which aspires to the world’s number one Internet company, has enthroned English as its official business language.

The part in the article that fascinates me most isn’t so much that English has ascended to the front ranks of world languages — needless to say, a remarkable story in its own right — but that the language is increasingly viewed by companies throughout the world, whether consciously or unconsciously, as a platform.

Company CEO Hiroshi Mikitani, who spearheaded the effort within Rakuten, understands that adoption will enable his company to lower transaction costs.  But he also appears to understand the value of English adoption in another important way: as the basis for creating a more highly diverse workforce, one better equipped to share multiple ideas and perspectives — a platform, in other words.

Over the long run, English will better enable his company to capitalize on the massive sharing and social collaboration that has been generated by the Internet and, more recently, Web 2.0 — generative capacity, as I’ve come to call it.

By capitalizing on this generative capacity, Rakuten better ensures that ideas shared among an increasingly diverse workforce will meet, mate and morph, increasing the likelihood for higher levels of creativity and innovation.

Therein lies one of the big lessons for Cooperative Extension.  We must understand that platforms are critical to our organizational future.  Extension professionals at all levels of our work must cultivate a clear understanding of platforms, how they work and the role they serve in optimizing the rate at sharing occurs with the ultimate goal of enhancing the likelihood of higher levels of creativity and innovation.

However, we can’t stop with platforms.  Platforms merely serve as the basis for the construction of dense ecosystems which, in human terms, provide contexts within which the exchange and recycling of ideas can occur more efficiently and at vastly accelerated rates.

As another recent article relates, a growing number of Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs are beginning to realize the important role ecosystems will serve in helping their economically beleaguered nation regain its innovative edge.

Cultivating these ecosystems is as much about cultivating a mindset as anything else.  Japan must break out of its self-imposed isolation to cultivate a newer, more open mindset that embraces creativity and innovation — the same sort of mindset that propelled post-war Japan to the front ranks of economic leadership in the last century.  This will call for a deeper awareness that even the most seemingly insignificant of innovations and insights within organizational ranks offer potentially far-reaching implications.

Within Extension ranks, this will call for a strong institutional commitment to openness and, equally important, an awareness at all levels that ecosystems thrive only within institutional contexts in which out-of-the box thinking not only is valued but actively encouraged and rewarded.

Building Charter Cities in Our Ranks

Hong Kong, the precursor to the charter cities concept, a city whose openness to change and innovation has presented a historic challenge to what was until recently the lumbering, centrally planned economy of the People’s Republic of China

I love one educational reformer’s explanation for what ails higher education:  the presence of a pervasive “anti-innovation culture.”

Needless to say, a lot of the technological reforms sorely needed in higher education have been stymied by the dogged resistance of this anti-innovation culture within our ranks.

Even as they resist, a tsunami is washing over our landscape, reordering everything in its wake.

More than ever, we need a legion of change agents or, as Oregon State University Cooperative Extension administrator Dave King describes it, a “coalition of the willing.”

As descriptions go, my personal pick is charter city.  The New York Times ran an article recently about economist Paul Romer’s efforts to establish charter cities aimed at resolving the intractably difficult problems that have historically plagued developing countries — the highly extractive oligarchies and laws that prey on the less fortunate, the one’s striving to succeed.

Romer perceives these charter cities as being insulated from the prevailing laws of the host country. The underlying presumption is that as these charter cities grow and become more prosperous, the host countries will be presented with a sort of fait accompli — a successfully functioning development model that they no longer can ignore.

Charter city proponents cite the prosperous, westernized enclave of Hong Kong, which has pointed the rest of China toward a future of openness, innovation and prosperity, as an especially noteworthy precursor of this concept.

As I see it, this is what the innovators, the coalition of the willing, within higher education in general and Cooperative Extension in particular must do — to create something akin to charter cities within our ranks, to present anti-innovators among us with a kind of fait accompli.

As we act on new insights and adapt them to our everyday work, we build these charter cities brick by brick.

Actually, construction on these new charter cities is already well under way.  Examples within my own state include the Alabama 4-H Youth Development Program’s self-transformation into an inquiry-based learning model and the efforts of two grassroots community foresters to develop Cooperative Extension’s first lecture doodle.

Here’s another point worth considering: As we build these charter cities, we transform ourselves into — dare I say it — agents of creative destruction.

In other words, by increasing the speed with which new ideas are introduced and actively discussed, we challenge the status quo, and by challenging the status quo, we introduce creatively destructive forces into our ranks.

Creative destruction isn’t new to Extension. We played a major role in the course of the 20^th century transforming the U.S. farming sector, rendering it more efficient and, consequently, more creatively destructive.

Our challenge now is to focus these creatively destructive forces inwardly, within our own ranks.

Creative destruction is not something from which we can flee. It’s the very basis of the information-driven global economic order that is emerging in the 21^st century.

The charter cities that ultimately will emerge within our ranks are inherently creatively destructive. Our long-term organizational survival is closely bound with this concept. By increasing these speed with which new ideas are raised and debated within our ranks and among our clients (who are now co-creators in every sense of the word) we better ensure that higher education and Extension will be fully equipped to thrive within this radically altered information and economic order.