Narain Batra: Innovation and the First Amendment

Editor’s note: This commentary is by Narain D. Batra, a First Amendment scholar who teaches communications and diplomacy at Norwich University where he is a professor. Some of the ideas here are adopted from his book, “The First Freedoms and America’s Culture of Innovation.” He recently completed a new book, “Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi: How India Plays the Game of Democracy.” 

Recently Dartmouth College celebrated its star academics Vijay Govindarajan and Geoffrey Parker for the induction to the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame for innovation and for digital transformation of businesses as well as the recognition of Richard D’Aveni and Sidney Finkelstein for their original strategic management thinking. It is imperative however to ask as to how America keeps innovating beyond the corporate world.

Why did Silicon Valley emerge and flourish in the United States but not in Europe, not in Japan, not in China? Do the American core values embodied in the First Amendment, one of the greatest human utterances born of the European Enlightenment, prompt and motivate competitive innovative behavior in the United States?

We must ascertain as to how innovation is correlated with freedom, freedom of speech and expression. Is innovation a function of what historian Albert Toynbee called as “challenge and response”? Historians say decline and fall is inevitable; but it happens only if a society is closed and its collective mind is fettered by a single dominant ideology or religious orthodoxy, where institutions such as the media for critical self-examination and unrestrained public discourse are not tolerated. This has not happened in the United States in spite of Donald Trump’s Twitter-based new orthodoxy, his constant denunciation of the media as purveyors of fake news, and not least the political polarization at large. 

A few golf seasons ago a casual conversation struck with a visiting South Korean businessman, let’s call him Chung-He, at the Hanover Country Club made me wonder as to how some cultures, especially the United States, let their people breach the “boundaries of permissible thought” and keep their society intellectually vibrant, creative, and innovative. 

As we ambled across the course from hole to hole, salivating hits and fretting mis-hits, Chung-Hee’s random observations sounded like the tweets of a cerebral backpacker. I was riveted. The golf course had become for me like the ancient Greek Agora, a place for dialogue. “America is a country of unlimited desires … Trying something that’s not permissible was very tempting and my mother encouraged me to do so. So today I am a hybrid Christian-Buddhist-Korean global businessman and I see everything interconnected and interdependent. America is so open that it creates limitless spaces for everyone and so I feel at home both in South Korea and America,” he said expanding his chest as he spoke.

Looking at me intensely, Chung-Hee said, do you remember the trope “the giant sucking sound”? Few other countries, he said, suck so much brainpower from all over the world as does the United States. I wondered whether he knew about the Indian-American management guru C.K Prahalad who said there’s plenty of fortune at the base of pyramid. But he was thinking more about Steve Jobs’ Syrian father and American mother, Barack Obama’s Kenyan father and American mother. “America is becoming more and more mixed-up, mongrelized and hybridized … more creative, more innovative, and more replenished every day, stronger and stronger,” he said.

We Koreans love freedom, he said, but we are afraid of free speech, extreme speech, fearless speech that allows Americans to think differently and break the boundaries of what is acceptable. In the Asian culture we have Confucius (the sage of obedience) but no Prometheus (the Greek Titan who defied the gods and stole their fire and gave it to humans for which he paid dearly). We have the conformity and the orderliness of Singapore but not the transgression and disorderly richness of London, Boston or New York, he said as the many-splendored New England afternoon sun burnished us.

But when Donald Trump asked America to pull down the curtain on the world, many of us were alarmed, including Tuck Business School’s Dean Matthew Slaughter and Dartmouth President Philip Hanlon who wrote last year in the Wall Street Journal that “Chinese Students Help America Innovate,” and visa ban for students was a “terrible idea.” Quoting a Kauffman Foundation study, they wrote, “Research has shown that immigrants who come on a student visa are likelier to start a company than either native-born Americans with similar education or other immigrants. Student-visa immigrants earn higher wages, receive more patents and commercialize more inventions. … Why close the door to so many great innovators when we need them?”  

 Just think about Russian immigrant Sergey Brin, who co-founded with Larry Page, Google, now a trillion dollar market-cap company, if his student visa at Stanford were terminated! Or Indian immigrants who came to America on student visas, for example, Sunder Pichai now heading Google and Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella! Imagine the audacity of U.S. presidential candidate for the 2020 election Andrew Yang, entrepreneur-philanthropist, for fighting poverty and income inequality, whose Taiwanese parents came to America as students and after getting their Ph.D.s stayed back instead of returning to their native Taiwan! The world has gained new insight for fighting poverty because of the new horizons opened up for field experimental economics by Abhijit Bannerjee and Esther Duflo, 2019 Nobelists (along with Harvard economist Michael Kremer), and authors of Good Economics for Hard Times, who came to America as students and chose to stay on at MIT and enrich global thinking.

The Thinkers50 Hall of Famers need to broaden their horizons and tell us as to how corporate innovation springs from America’s core values embodied in the First Amendment, the perpetual source of the nation’s self-renewal and creativity.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Narain Batra: Innovation and the First Amendment.