Become a certified 4th industrial revolutionary

By Jason Lim

Everything is certified these days. From used cars, massages and organic foods to program management and cyber security, certification is a ubiquitous and somewhat mysterious term that denotes a certain level of quality, authenticity, truthfulness, expertise, and everything good about the product or person. In fact, there are certifications that certify other certification processes so as to certify their capability to certify things in a certifiable way. It’s certifiably crazy sometimes.

Granted, certification is oftentimes useful way for potential consumers to lessen their chances of buying lemons and employers to mitigate the risk of hiring an unqualified subject matter expert. Professional certifications, especially, does imply a certain level of baseline competency for specific subject areas and provide some guidance among competing and chaotic claims for expertise. At the same time, certification is also used to raise the barrier to entry for certain professions, control the market for specific skill sets that are in particular demand, or make a quick buck by offering professional branding or respectability through a quick training and testing program.

But when South Korea’s Ministry of Labor recently announced that they were now offering certifications for skills related to the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” These skills include 3D printing, robot manufacturing and so on. In announcing the establishment of 17 new professional certification areas that included the above, the Ministry of Labor expressed hope that these new certifications would increase employment in jobs related to the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

For those of you no familiar with the term, Fourth Industrial Revolution refers to the potential that the new, emerging technologies such as ubiquitous connectivity of things (IoT), artificial intelligence, neural-machine cognitive interface, autonomous driving vehicles, robots and others will fundamentally shift the way that human beings interact with their environment and one another. It follows on the heels of the Third Industrial Revolution that began in the 1980’s and transformed our analog world into a digital one. In short, it’s a term that describes a socioeconomic phenomenon that is founded on set of disruptive technologies that are still maturing and translating themselves into products and services. In short, it’s still in the storming and forming stages. No one knows how this will all shake out at the end.

And now the South Korean central government wants to certify what’s not really defined and encourage employment in jobs that don’t exist. It’s pretty obvious that the Ministry of Labor views its certification process as some sort of a centrally-managed job creation effort, much akin to public works projects. While I laud its efforts to want to be proactive, I don’t think formal certification process is the best way to encourage innovation and prepare South Korea to compete in the coming paradigm shift.

This reminds me strongly of former President Park Geun-hye’s mantra of “Creative Economy” that the government tried to drive by building Creative Centers of Excellence in every province and giving lip service to the need put into place a nurturing environment for start up’s. It was an attempt to drive innovation through exhortation, rather than a serious attempt to reform the economic planning and governance structure that inhibits entrepreneurships and gives lopsided advantage to the established conglomerates.

This is a perfect example of what got you here won’t get you there. South Korea’s governance psyche is so addicted to the lessons learned during the march to the Miracle on Han that everything that has happened since then has been an attempt to apply the old model to new environments and paradigms. Using centralized command and control to allocate resources to maximize national output during transition into an industrialized economy might have worked before, but you can’t issue a government mandate to spring forth a Silicon Valley. You have to allow your economy to innovate from bottom-up.

Understand that allocation in resources, skills, and focus is determined not only by formal policies but also by personal initiative, informal relationships, spontaneous actions, and preferences of people at all levels. In short, create an ecosystem of empowerment at the lowest levels possible because this will lead to not only efficiency but also innovation that’s bottom up, which is more likely to be taken up by others.In essence, you cannot dictate the shape and flow of innovation top down.

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, professor at Harvard Business School, writes, “Formal structures can be too general or too rigid to accommodate multidirectional pathways for resources and idea flows. Rigidity stifles innovation. Informal, self-organizing, shape-changing, and temporary networks are more flexible and can make connection between people or connect bundles of resources more quickly… When people self-organize to create networks to share information, new initiatives or innovations are often the result. Organizations must encourage the creation of such networks and facilitate them through communication platforms or meeting spaces.”

In other words, sometimes less is more.

Jason Lim is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture. He has been writing for The Korea Times since 2006. Reach him at jasonlim@msn.com, facebook. com/jasonlimkoreatimes or @jasonlim2012.