A creative disconnect
Hong Kong wants innovative and creative people to ensure it can tackle, head-on, its challenges of regional competition, a declining birth rate and an ageing population. The government is attracting them here under its Quality Migrant Admission Scheme and aims to home-grow them through educational reforms that will end rote learning and unquestioned acceptance by students of what they are told, so as to create citizens who can think out of the box.
It's a pity that there is a disconnect with such thinking and the real world of Hong Kong. Innovative, creative ideas produced by local people have only a rare chance of success because of a business environment that refuses to try anything new unless it is certain to bring high financial returns.
Remember that dilemma of which came first, the chicken or the egg? Our leaders want us to change the world, but there can be none of this while those with such an objective are told to go elsewhere and come back when they have a sure-fire winner.
The credit for inventiveness in such circumstances is invariably taken by those in other countries, who saw how brilliant the idea was and ran with it. What a waste of government energy: all that talk, time and money putting in place and educating people who can make this city thrive, only to have them take their talents elsewhere due to a lack of support.
Time and again we hear of the creations that Hong Kong rejected: the moving advertisement in the MTR tunnel between Wan Chai and Causeway Bay that was not seen as a viable marketing tool, although Japanese seem to think otherwise; the Academy-Award-winning documentary Blood of Yingzhou District, by Hong-Kong-born director Ruby Yang about Aids sufferers in China, that film distributors were not willing to take on; and the clothing designers who have left because they were unable to compete with the local love of brand-names and have since won plaudits in their new homes for their flair.
In a free-market system such as ours, the local business rejection of these ideas is justified. If something is not considered able to float, it should sink, no matter what its pedigree.
The result of our free-market spirit is that our biggest claim to inventive fame is the Octopus card. (A rock-sampling tool, jointly developed by a local dentist and Hong Kong Polytechnic University engineers, was chosen for the European Space Agency's Beagle 2 mission to Mars, but its effectiveness as the first Chinese-made gadget into space is unknown because contact with the craft was lost after it landed.)
We may yet gain bigger international acclaim for inventiveness now that there is growing interest globally for Motorwind, a micro wind turbine that was created by a local company, Motorwave, with research assistance from the University of Hong Kong. While there is avid interest from the business community in the invention for its environmentally friendly way of producing electricity, the firm had no government support, or easy access to officials to discuss the technology, despite leaders' rhetoric about wanting to reduce air pollution and promote innovation.
So, here's the answer to that disconnect between attracting and educating people to direct the city's future viability, and making it happen: an environment of encouragement from the highest levels that instils pride in achievements. As long as our leaders set a poor example, those with good ideas will take them elsewhere.
This is not to say that the government is incapable or even averse to helping out. The Octopus card would not be the success it is today if the Hong Kong Monetary Authority had not allowed it to be used beyond the transport network by granting the operator in 2000 a deposit-taking company licence - removing restrictions prohibiting Octopus from generating more than 15 per cent of its turnover from non-transit related functions.
Applauding a filmmaker who does well, promoting a wind turbine, and offering financial incentives to innovative citizens does not violate free-market principles. Rather, such actions by the government prove that what it says is more than just hot air.
Peter Kammerer is the Post's foreign editor
