Amongst all the recent ipad news, this story on Steve Jobs and the ‘auteur model of innovation’ is probably the most relevant to China. Despite the fact that the shanzhai version of the ipad was on the market months before the original and that the Shenzhen company is, hilariously, said to be considering suing apple for copyright infringement, contemporary Chinese culture is agonizing over how to make the jump from ‘made in China to created in China’.
What Jobs, like Sony’s Akio Morita, who invented the walkman amidst widespread doubts that anyone would want a handheld stereo, or Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto (profiled here at NYT), who is behind practically all of the company’s creations, make clear is the crucial role that individual genius plays in true innovation.
The ideal of genius is perhaps best summed up by Jobs himself in his commencement address at Stanford. Jobs, who was a college drop-out is adamant that his greatest periods of creativity were triggered by failures, humiliation and crises. He admonishes the students ” not to let the noise of other people’s opinions drown out your inner voice,” to find what you love and to say true to what you are most passionate about.
After a weekend conversation with a local teenage friend I am left wondering whether contemporary Chinese culture leaves room for this notion of individual genius.
The conversation began with a familiar discussion on overloading preschool kids with extra curricular classes. By age 3 or 4 most Chinese kids, our friend insisted, are already enrolled in a sports class, calligraphy, drawing and music. Amongst the usual protests about the value of free time and play, we suggested that it was probably best to follow a child’s interests, exposing them to a bunch of different things and then following where their talents or desires led.
Our friend disagreed. She had already argued that Chinese culture did not put much faith in innate intelligence – the same was true, she now claimed, for innate talents or passions. Kids don’t know what they are good at — or even what they like. In her view, and she insisted this was in tune with the cultural norm, children are blank slates whose desires, interests, talents — even passions can be molded according to an adult’s will.
This attitude makes sense in a culture where it is the parents that make all the crucial decisions about what their children ought to be. When I tried the counter argument that her mother wanted her to study law because she was good at debating she objected. ‘I am good at debating only because every day, since I was three, my mother decided that I should study law.’
Though there is much to value in this determined pragmatism and the many successes (including our friend’s) attest to the legitimacy of the approach. Yet, in this environment the myth of an individual genius, a person consumed by a passion – acting against the norm engaged in a project that no one else supports or understands holds little sway. But isn’t this — despite all the politically correct caveats , precisely, how most of the greatest innovation takes place?