The Innovation Nation

As we celebrate our nation’s 250^th birthday, we should be especially thankful that our founders protected the liberties embraced by the early patriots. In so doing, they incubated a fledgling United States that would one day become the world leader in discovery and enterprise: an Innovation Nation.

Indeed, our founding ideals of freedom, equality, and self-governance gave government a role to play in society, but not the lead role. In America, positive change almost always begins far from the halls of political power. Politicians make the headlines and the history books, but innovators and entrepreneurs shape society and move the nation forward.

That was even true of our nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson wrote those magnificent words 15 months after the War of Independence had begun at Lexington and Concord. The colonies were already governing themselves and just about all the British governors had fled the country. Jefferson and his colleagues gave voice to what had already been accomplished.

A generation later, Jefferson served as our nation’s third president. He was firmly opposed to manufacturing in the United States and wanted the United States to remain an agrarian nation. But an innovator named Sam Slater had other ideas. While Jefferson ran the government, Slater moved the nation forward. He built America’s first manufacturing empire and became known as the Father of the American Industrial Revolution.

Later in the 19^th century, another president highlighted how innovators move the nation forward while politicians lag behind. When Alexander Graham Bell showed President Rutherford B. Hayes the telephone for the first time, the president reportedly said: “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?”

The dawn of the 20^th century provided a particularly dramatic example of this phenomenon. On October 7, 1903, a government-funded effort to build a “flying machine” ended with a crash into the Potomac River. The aircraft had been financed by what was then the largest defense grant in US history. Two days later, The New York Times confidently declared that human flight was at least “a million years” away.

Ironically, that same day the Wright brothers began building their own plane. Nine weeks later, they made history at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Lacking formal credentials or government backing, the brothers relied on trial and error, improvisation, and their own homemade wind tunnel. Their success came from experimentation — from learning by doing.

People like Sam Slater, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers had a bigger impact on our nation—and the entire world—than any of the presidents of their time. None of their accomplishments would have happened if governments and politicians led the nation. And the same dynamic is true in America today. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter assembled a commission of national leaders to create a National Agenda for the ‘80s. The political, business, union, and academic leaders laid out the challenges facing our nation along with what they saw as proposed solutions.

Funnily enough, the book-length report prepared by this presidential commission never mentioned the word “computer.” The big names of the time had no idea that two then-unknown guys were preparing to re-shape the nation in ways political leaders couldn’t imagine. While the politicians remained stuck in the past, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were creating the future by building their innovative companies.

In this century, Google, smartphones, and social media companies have all shaped the nation more than the four men who have served as president. And it’s safe to assume that AI will have a bigger impact on the next generation than anybody who wins the presidency in 2028 or the elections that follow.

This dynamic is frustrating for politicians, but, certainly, great news for the rest of us.

To understand what made the United States an Innovation Nation, we need to head back to 1636. A group of colonists with lofty ambitions to create a “city on a hill” decided a college was needed to create this new world. There was, however, one not so little problem. Under English law, only the king had the authority to create a college or business.

The colonists didn’t want to ask the king for a charter because they feared he would want control over the college in exchange. In particular, they worried that the King would insist on teaching the very religious practices they had fled by crossing the Atlantic.

The colonists improvised, and created Harvard on their own. They got away with it partly because they were far away and partly because the English king had bigger problems to worry about. The English Civil War broke out just as the new school was getting started.

Once the colonists realized they could create things without first getting permission from government, innovation flourished. Other colleges, including Yale, were created in a manner the Crown considered illegal. Libraries, anti-poverty efforts, abolition societies, hospitals, museums, and businesses were all created without permission. When the time came, that also provided colonial leaders with the practical experience needed to create a Continental Congress and other governing institutions.

The decision to start a college without getting royal permission was primarily an act of pragmatism. But it was also an act of defiance and independence because it recognized the right of a free people to act on their own. That decision in 1636 led to the creation of a distinct colonial culture. There was nothing the British could do to stop the colonists from creating new organizations without first getting government approval.

One hundred-forty years later, that distinct culture became an independent country. That new country became an Innovation Nation and the last, best hope for mankind.