From Xeroxing to Googling: an obituary for creativity

Joseph Schumpeter was a genius and his language supported that. He coined the term ‘creative destruction’. Simply put, creative minds come up with new products or services that render the existing products or services obsolete - they ‘destroy’ them. The gramophone was destroyed by cassette player which was destroyed by CD player. The destruction continued when the CD player was laid to rest by the iPod. The same applies to other sectors and industries.

Telegrams were destroyed by short messages or SMSes. And credit and debit cards will be destroyed by M-Pesa. The horse carriage was destroyed by the car, which has proved surprisingly resilient. We could go on. As long as creativity thrives, such destruction will remain. Kodak was destroyed by the digital camera, which paradoxically it invented. The question that remains is if creativity itself can be destroyed.

Two threats could destroy creativity with serious consequences on economic growth. The first killer is the photocopier, which is itself under threat from the Internet. By making it easy to photocopy papers, it was easy to get other people’s ideas, instead of being creative and coming up with yours. Higher education was a victim of that, with the term Xeroxing becoming common.

The advent of computers and storage devices made photocopying unnecessary. You could just carry the ideas on a flash drive or CD. Starting in the 1990s, carrying physical storage devices became unnecessary, you could now store your ideas in cyberspace. The Internet made it easier to get other people ideas and pass them off as yours. Search engines like Google made it easier to find the location of these ideas in cyberspace - we call that Googling.

People have lost their reputations for plagiarism. Will Xeroxing and now Googling help write an obituary for creativity? Economic progress is buttressed on creativity which spawns new ideas, some of which are protected with patents or copyrights. Advanced economies pay a lot of attention to creativity and have incentivised it.

By ensuring that photocopying of books is punishable by law, developed countries have thriving publishing firms from McGraw to Pearson or Longman. They employ lots of people. The book writers get returns for their thinking, their creativity and are encouraged to keep writing. I could sit and write a great book, but the owners of photocopiers will make more money than me.

It is no wonder that we keep complaining about lack of textbooks or even fiction writers. It is no wonder Ngugi wa Thiong’o has few competitors in Kenya. Has anyone in Kenya gone to jail for photocopying books? The same applies to music and computer software. Why buy software when you can copy it for the price of a CD, though they cost about the same price. While an operating system might cost you Sh10,000, it is worthy because someone must be rewarded for thinking, for being creative.

Government protects innovations through patents so that creative thinkers can be rewarded handsomely when they turn their ideas into new products and service delivery systems. Assured of recouping their costs and making a good profit, thinkers or creative people are encouraged to keep spawning new ideas. There are fears now that with the Internet, creativity is waning. Why think when ideas can be found in cyberspace? Luckily, anti-plagiarism software was an idea whose time had surely come.

Spontaneity, which is a hallmark of creativity, is becoming rare. Employers mourn that most new employees do not take the initiative but rather wait to be assigned tasks.  Yet, they value new ideas. Human resource weed out non-creative employees through aptitude tests. They test your natural ability, not your cramming power.

Other pundits observe another piece of compelling evidence on how the Internet has eroded our creativity - the fact that quite a number of comedians and entertainers are not highly educated, they never learned the art and science of Xeroxing and Googling. Lots of ideas are photocopied without paper or the Internet, which may be why lots of very creative youngsters dropped out of school, bored by the recycling.

 Recycling old ideas

Are the fears over waning creativity justified? Yes, without new ideas, we recycle old tired ideas. We become followers. Check out the price of mitumba both in the apparel industry and in academia. Does this explain why Kenya has more graduates than any other time in history, but more problems? There seems to be a high correlation between national creativity, proxied by the number of patents registered per year, and economic growth. It is no wonder that the US, China and Japan are the three biggest economies and happen to register the the highest number of patents.

Where do we go from here? From our homes to State House, creativity should be nurtured. Unfortunately, we see creativity through the eyes of comedians. There is lots of creativity in every sector from car manufacturing to drug making. We need to incentivise creativity so that creative people are rewarded. On the economic front, we need venture capitalists to fund creative ideas, which will spawn the next generation of Apples and Googles. The Youth Fund, Uwezo and Women Fund are not enough; we need the invisible hand of the market too.

Some observers have argued that with the Internet, the creative few will reap handsomely and have the kind of influence that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Think of Facebook. Without nurturing creativity, we risk having the vast majority of people becoming drones, to follow the few. How do our schools nurture creativity? What of work places, what of our homes? Interestingly, creativity is one resource that has no limit and does not suffer from the law of diminishing returns. It’s one resource we can exploit as we aspire to make Kenya the Swahili Tiger in our lifetime.