I recently read an excellent innovation report, 'Surfing Toward the Future: Chile in the 2025 ', which naturally focuses on Chile, but offers many findings and recommendations that apply to the U.S. and most other advanced and emerging economies.
我最近读到一篇讲创新的报告，很不错，题目是“向未来冲浪：2025年的智利”(Surfing Toward the Future: Chile in the 2025)。报告当然是以智利为重点，但它也给出了很多适用于美国及其他大部分发达经济体和新兴经济体的结论和建议。
The document was developed by Chile's National Innovation Council for Competitiveness (CNIC), a public-private organization charged with providing advice to strengthen innovation and competitiveness in the country. The report was presented to Chile's President Sebastian Piñera on August 6.
报告由智利国家竞争力创新委员会(National Innovation Council for Competitiveness，简称CNIC)编写，8月6日呈递给智利总统塞瓦斯蒂安·皮涅拉(Sebastian Pinera)。CNIC是一家公私合营组织，负责提供如何提高该国创新水平和竞争力的建议。
But this is like no innovation document I've read. While the 'Surfing Toward the Future' report recommends the long term initiatives Chile should prioritize-energy and sustainability, biology and life sciences, education, and the development of an innovation culture-it's how the report expands our idea of innovation by asking readers to look at it in a more historical timeframe that makes this report stand out.
但这份报告不同于我读过的任何有关创新的文件。《向未来冲浪》建议智利重视能源与可持续发展、生物学与生命科学、教育、创新文化的培育等长远议程，但这份报告的与众不同之处在于，它邀请读者在一个更大的历史框架之下来看待创新，从而拓宽我们头脑中的创新概念。
The language is also more literary than is typical for technical or business documents. This is not surprising since the report's author, CNIC head Fernando Flores, is an accomplished writer in both English and Spanish. He has a Ph. D from UC Berkeley and has worked extensively as an entrepreneur and consultant in computer science, human cognition and organizational leadership. He has written a number of books, including 'Understanding Computers and Cognition: a New Foundation for Design' and 'Building Trust: in Business, Politics, Relationships and Life'.
其措辞也比技术文件或商业文件中的常见措辞更有文采。这不奇怪，因为报告作者、CNIC主席费尔南多·弗洛雷斯(Fernando Flores)本身就是一位造诣颇深的英文和西班牙文作家。他拥有加州大学伯克利分校(UC Berkeley)的博士学位，在计算机科学、人类认知和组织领导力领域有着丰富的创业和咨询经验。他写过好几本书，比如《理解计算机与认知：设计的新基础》(Understanding Computers and Cognition: a New Foundation for Design)和《建立信任：商界、政坛、人际与生活》(Building Trust: in Business, Politics, Relationships and Life)等。
I first met Mr. Flores during a trip to Chile in August of 2006 to attend a conference. He was a Senator then, a position he held from March of 2002 until his appointment to president of the Innovation Council. We discovered that we had a number of common interests - in addition to our common language - and have since become friends and met a number of times in Chile and the U.S.
我第一次见到弗洛雷斯是2006年8月去智利参加一个论坛期间，那时候他还是参议员。从2002年3月份直到被任命为CNIC主席，他一直是参议员。我们发现，两个人之间除了共同语言之外还有好几种共同兴趣，于是后来成了朋友，在智利和美国都见过多次。
The report admits that many view innovation as being primarily the combination of science, technology and creativity that gives rise to new products and services. Mr. Flores believes that this is too limited a view. To really understand its power and the role it has played throughout human civilization, he asks us to look at innovation in a more historical timeframe. Innovation is essentially how individuals, communities and institutions deal with periods of accelerating changes and historical transitions. This is why, given our ongoing transition from the industrial economy of the past two centuries to a new information-based economy, we've been so focused on innovation over the past decade and are likely to continue to do so well into the future.
报告承认，很多人眼中的创新首先是科学、技术和创造力的组合，这种组合使新的产品和服务得以诞生。弗洛雷斯认为这一观点过于狭隘。为了真正理解创新的力量以及它在人类文明史上扮演的角色，他邀请我们在更大的历史框架里审视创新。从本质上讲，创新就是个人、群体和组织对加速变革时期和历史转折期的应对。因此，鉴于我们正在从过去两个世纪的工业经济向一种以信息为基础的新型经济转变，过去10年我们是如此关注创新，将来也很有可能会继续关注创新。
These accelerating changes are shaking our most fundamental beliefs and assumptions. They include economic and cultural globalization, longer life spans, the empowerment of individuals and communities and potentially serious disruptions to the planet's ecology. 'We should all think of ourselves as new immigrants to our present hyperconnected world, ' is how NY Times columnist Tom Friedman characterized our times at a September 2011 conference I attended. We're travelers in an uncertain journey that is fraught with the perils of creative destruction as well as the promise of exciting new opportunities. But, we have no choice but to embark on the journey, despite not quite knowing where we are heading or what major disruptions lie ahead.
这些越来越快的变化正在动摇我们最根本的信念和假设。它们包括经济与文化全球化、预期寿命延长、个人与群体获权，以及地球生态可能遭遇严重破坏等。“我们全都应该把自己当作进入当今这个超连接世界的新移民。”《纽约时报》(NY Times)专栏作家汤姆·弗里德曼(Tom Friedman)在2011年9月份我参加的一个论坛上如此形容我们的时代。我们是一条不确定行程上的旅客，这个行程上布满创造性破坏造成的险境，也布满激动人心的新机会带给人的希望。但我们别无选择，只能继续走下去，尽管不太清楚是在往哪个方向走，前面会有什么样的重大波折。
Successful innovations require three major forces to come together. First is the creative and entrepreneurial capacity to understand what the market is ready for and be able to come up with the right ideas for new products and services. But, to develop and bring them to market, you also need the right ecosystem-including technologies, tools, production, sales channels, support services, marketing and finance. Finally, customers have to be ready to change, break with the past and embrace the innovative, new products and services.
成功的创新需要有三股重要力量结合在一起。首先是理解市场需要什么、给出合适的产品服务创意的创造能力和创业能力。而要开发出新产品、新服务并把它们推向市场，也需要有合适的生态系统，包括技术、工具、生产、销售渠道、支持服务、营销和金融等。最后，客户必须是做好了迎接变革的准备，可以跟过去决裂、迎接创新性的产品和服务。
Innovation is thus the result of a highly complex, dynamic ecosystem, not unlike the ecosystems you find in evolutionary biology that have given rise to the diversity of life in our planet. In addition, innovation involves complex interactions across multiple time horizons, from the near-term incremental improvements to mature products to the long term emergence of highly disruptive innovations and new scientific disciplines.
因此创新源自高度复杂、活跃的生态系统，其复杂和活跃程度与进化生物学中形成地球生命多样化的那些生态系统别无二致。除此以外，创新还涉及多个时间范围的复杂互动：有短时间范围内让产品臻于成熟的增量式改良，也有长时间范围内高破坏性创新和新科学原理的出现。
Companies and economies must continually improve their existing products and services through incremental innovations as well as extensions to adjacent markets. But, they also need to understand the major long term technical, economic and societal changes and develop a vision of the future. Such a vision is needed to help guide the company's major directions, including which learning curves they should get on. Without it, the company runs the risk of missing the big picture and getting left behind by a fast moving world.
企业和经济体必须通过增量创新、向邻近市场拓展来持续地改良现有产品和服务，同时也需要理解长时间范围内技术、经济和社会方面的重大变革，对未来形成一套展望。这样的展望是指引企业大方向（比如应该遵循什么样的学习曲线）所需，没有它，企业就有可能看不清大形势，被飞快前进的世界甩在身后。
Mr. Flores proposes an innovation style for facing such an unpredictable future, which he calls surfing history. It is similar to the style of successful entrepreneurs. It requires overcoming our fears of change and uncertainty, and transforming our concerns for the future into concrete actions and commitments in the present.
弗洛雷斯提出一种直面这种不确定未来的创新风格，他称之为“在历史中冲浪”。这种风格和成功企业家的风格相似，要求克服我们对变化和不确定性的恐惧，把我们对未来的忧虑转化为当下的实际行动和决心。
The analogy to surfing is intriguing. Surfers can never be sure how the waves will flow. And they must be on watch for dangerous waves that can potentially hurt or even kill them. 'Though the surfers cannot go anywhere they please-it would be naive to pretend to control the sea- by remaining in constant harmony with the waves and receptive to what appears, they can find the space of stability and a path forward, ' writes Flores.
冲浪比喻很有意思。冲浪的人从不知道海浪将如何流动，他们必须留意那些有可能伤害甚至杀死他们的危险浪头。弗洛雷斯写道：“虽然冲浪者做不到想往哪冲就往哪冲（自以为能掌控海洋是幼稚之举），但通过与浪头保持持续的和谐并乐于接受眼前出现的东西，他们可以找到稳定的立足地和前进的道路。”
'To surf the emerging waves of history we must free ourselves from the more pragmatic conversations. Those are the most common and daily conversations, the ones we operate with in an established world of things, institutions and roles in order to meet our daily needs and desires. Beyond pragmatic conversations, the history surfers engage in conversations that disclose new worlds, tuned to anomalies that suddenly come to light as new horizons . . . This kind of courage that we call radical hope emerges from the confidence that humans will keep moving forward, reinventing the meaning of our existence.'
“要畅行于历史中不断涌现的浪头之上，我们必须把自己从更加现实的对话中解放出来。这些对话是最常见、最日常的对话，是我们在事物、组织和角色的既成世界中进行的对话，目的是满足我们的日常需求和欲望。在现实对话之外，历史冲浪者还参与那些揭示新世界的对话，习惯于那些像新的地平线一样突然出现的非常态……这种勇气我们称之为激进希望，它源自这样一种信心：人类将会继续前进，重寻存在的意义。”
Let me conclude by saying a few words about a couple of the long term initiatives that the 'Surfing Toward the Future' report recommends Chile should focus its efforts on.
最后让我说一下《向未来冲浪》建议智利关注的几个长远议程。
In biology and the life sciences, for example, the report notes that a revolution is under way that will have global impacts on health, food, energy and the environment. This revolution is being driven by the aging of the populations in much of the world, which is significantly increasing the social costs of dealing with older adults; by personalized medicine, which will transform the health care industry around the world and will ultimately lead to longer and healthier lives; and by synthetic biology, which promises major scientific advances in food and energy productions but also raises many questions concerning genetically modified organisms.
比如报告指出，生物学和生命科学领域正在发生一场革命，它将对卫生、食品、能源和环境产生全球性的影响。这场革命背后的推动因素，有世界很多国家都存在的人口老龄化，它显著提高了照顾老年人的社会成本；有定制化医疗，它将给全世界的医疗产业带来转型，最终将延长人的寿命、提高人的健康水平；有合成生物学，它有望带来食品和能源生产的重大科学进展，但也导致了很多涉及到转基因的问题。
On education, the report observes that the deep future changes we expect demand equally major changes to our educational systems. High school education must take responsibility for motivating young people by creating spaces where they can discover that learning is an important and exciting adventure they will be involved in through their whole lives. Higher education, which is increasingly a requirement for decent jobs in our knowledge economy, must reduce its rapidly rising costs which are keeping a quality education out of the reach of so many young people around the world. The advent of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and other forms of online and hybrid learning promise to radically expand access to low-cost quality education around the world.
在教育方面，报告认为，预计在将来发生的深度变革要求我们对教育体制进行同样大刀阔斧的改革。高中教育必须承担起激发年轻人的责任，为年轻人开辟出空间，让年轻人意识到学习是他们整个一生都将参与的一场重要而激动人心的冒险。高等教育在我们的知识经济中已经是谋取体面工作的必备条件，它必须降低快速上升的成本，因为高成本让世界上那么多的年轻人都无缘优质教育。大规模网络公开课和其他网络教育、混合教育形式的出现，有望极大地扩展低成本优质教育在世界各地的惠及范围。
'It's no longer possible to think about the future as something fixed and predictable, ' writes Mr. Flores. 'On the contrary we understand it as the horizon of possibilities that is being built with our actions today. Although the sum of those actions can lead to unpredictable results, the reponsibility of politics-to present and future generations-is to anticipate possibilities and to build orientations that allow us to draw routes ahead and take actions . . . '
弗洛雷斯写道：“把未来想成某种一成不变的、可以预料的东西，已经不再可能。相反，我们将未来理解成用今天的行动创造的各种可能性。虽然这些行动加起来可能会造成不可预料的结果，但政治对今人和后人的责任就是预知各种可能性，树立方向，使我们能够划出脚下的道路，采取行动……”
'The work of the Innovation Council is similar to that of the historian. The historian creates narratives about the past that should be consistent with the evidence of events or processes that occurred years or centuries ago and that allow us to recognize what we are. At the Innovation Council, we look for an understanding that, being consistent with the subtle trends that start to configure the future, can help us to illuminate the present and to outline possible future paths, threats or opportunities.'
“创新委员会的工作与历史学家的工作相似。历史学家形成有关过去的叙事，这些叙事应当与数年前、数百年前发生的事件或过程证据相符，也使我们能够认清自己。在创新委员会，我们寻找一种理解，这种理解与那些开始塑造未来的微妙趋势相符，能够帮助我们照亮当前，勾勒出将来可能出现的道路、威胁或机遇。”
Irving Wladawsky-Berger is a former vice-president of technical strategy and innovation at IBM. He is a strategic advisor to Citigroup and is a regular contributor to CIO Journal.
（本文作者曾在IBM担任技术战略与创新副总裁，现为花旗集团(Citigroup)策略顾问，定期给《华尔街日报》“CIO Journal”栏目撰稿。
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