Youth bulge: Innovation through new lens

Pakistan needs an annual growth of eight per cent to channel its massive youth bulge from becoming a liability into an opportunity and this must be done now. For such drastic change, we need to challenge entrenched orthodoxies because they have started to smother rather than stimulate progress. Such a status quo is blinding us to the promises of new global norms and competitive spaces, and to come out of this conventional stranglehold we need to inculcate a habit of questioning beliefs which have been taken for granted.

We seem to be consistently missing bandwagons because we are always embroiled in one crisis or the other. The difference between them and us is our habit of making every crisis an occupation of national interest, “letting every opportunity go to waste”, while they with all their problems, even some greater than ours, never lose their sense of purpose.

To start with, our leadership should stop seeing this country as a collection of ethnicities in geographical confines rather it should consider them as a portfolio of competencies and strategic assets which could be leveraged in varying ways to generate new worth. We need innovation in our thinking, our way of looking and our dealings to maximise resource utilisation.

Youth bulge

Does anybody realise that this nation is going through a massive youth bulge as nearly 63 per cent of the population is under the age of 25, reminding us of the Baby Boom that made the United States a global power. Are we going to miss this boat too that almost every other nation exploited to enhance its stature, shall we utilise this asset in ways better than just blowing it off in extremist hands?

We all know that the future is gravitating irrevocably towards Asia. Look at China and India, they are breathing business. One thing that is unique with such miracles is the tendency to convert problems, some even unprecedented, into opportunities. But such a transformation comes through unparalleled innovation and not just in a traditional course.

Gupta’s Honey Bee Network and Yunus’s Grameen Bank are striking examples of how social causes can be blended into profitable business innovations to deliver Murthy’s ‘compassionate capitalism’.

Innovation requires neither genius nor inheritance and wealth, it is the unorthodox perspective of seeing through the common and spotting the unseen. And to achieve such a threshold, we need to turn the population, at least the ordinary 113 million youth, into extraordinary innovators, by inculcating a deep nationwide conviction that ‘innovation starts with me’.

It is time to imagine the future as imagination is more important than knowledge. Tomorrow is for smart nations that know how best to optimise their strengths, capitalise on existing knowledge and evaluate the circumstances to pre-conceive and chart their own future. We need to espouse the corporate theory of relationship capital to re-synapse people, ideas and assets across and beyond this country to make innovation essentials possible that unfurl more often by combining the same ingredients through new recipes. If we cannot become the world’s factory or the information technology hub, could we not wish to become an ‘idea hub’ of the world?

The author is an IBA Karachi graduate and is policy consultant with the Planning Commission Email: [e-mail]

Published in The Express Tribune, January 24^th,  2011.