From Sustainability to Innovation: Thomas Friedman to Qi Lu

Contributed by Cathy Zhu

Stanford, CA (Oct 04, 2010)– Just this past week, two international conferences were hosted here in the Bay Area.  Wednesday saw the conclusion of Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project 2010 Research Symposium (“Creating a Sustainable Energy System for the 21st Century and Beyond”), as well as the launching of HYSTA (Hua Yuan Science and Technology Association)’s “Drivers for Growth and Innovation”, their annual conference focusing on IT and entrepreneurship across both sides of the pacific.

Despite their difference on technical focuses, the two conferences shared a common theme: the idea that ensuring sustainability is the challenge of our time and that innovation is the key solution. As noted by the two keynote speakers Thomas Friedman and Yinyi Qian, it is an idea accompanied by a sense of immediacy and urgency; it is an idea that simultaneously brings empowerment and responsibility; it is an idea that defines and shapes international relations today, especially those of US and China. It is one that perhaps will continue to do so throughout the coming years.

The GCEP conference focused on the need for sustainable development. Keynote speaker and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman aptly captured the way we are currently treating our markets and our mother nature in three phrases: we are “under-pricing risk, privatizing gains, and socializing losses.”  This is not only a concise summary of the financial crisis, but also an accurate picture of our environmental situation. Climate change is becoming a globally recognized threat to our survival, but our governments have yet to put a price tag on carbon emissions.  Friedman describes “the American model” of living as one continuous cycle of buying and selling ever-increasing numbers of consumer products, produced by ever-increasing numbers of factories in China, powered by ever-increasing numbers of coal-fired power plants, that result in an ever-increasing trade imbalance, which encourages ever-increasing American consumption on credit, bringing us back to the beginning of the cycle. Each link in the chain is driven by short-term pursuit of privatized profit, which comes at a societal cost of long-term environmental degradation. In an increasingly “hot, flat, and crowded world”, Americans must change the “way of living” example they are setting for the rest of the world, because the world was not created to sustain an entire world population living on such extravagancy and waste.

So how do we act and how do we act now? HYSTA gave an excellent illustration by showcasing how businessmen and entrepreneurs are now changing China’s economic model. The answer given by Qi Lu, Microsoft President of Online Services, is in one word: innovation. There are three drivers of economic growth, says Lu, labor, capital, and productivity, and only one of them is sustainable: increasing labor and capital productivity.  Thus, the daylong conference saw high-level executives of Baidu and Tencent come and talk about unleashing young Chinese minds from the rigid thinking of China’s test-based education system, teaching them to take risks, break rules, and think outside the box. Entrepreneurs shared case studies of business success before a panel on the challenges and benefits of “Return to China”. The business model for cross-pacific ventures is rapidly evolving from one that merely combines America’s talents and technology with China’s vast capital reserves and untapped markets. Increasingly, Chinese R&D is yielding ideas and technology that are beginning to enter the US. The rapidity of innovation, growth of new successful ventures, the progress towards cleaner technology, all tell us one thing: we are addressing our sustainability issue and we are doing it right here, right now.

So where does this leave us, at the beginning of the school year and nearing the beginning of a new decade? Here at FACES, we firmly believe in the importance and relevance of our mission: building the US-China bridge by developing and connecting the leaders of tomorrow. Whether it is facing common challenges or finding common solutions, mutual understanding, exchange, and collaboration between USA and China is more important than ever today.