Chinese State Councilor Liu Yandong on Wednesday called for teaching faculty and students of a mining university to promote its fine traditions and embrace innovation.

She called for efforts to build the university into a world-class institution of higher learning, deepen its educational reform, embrace innovation in its mode of personnel training so as to provide support for national development of energy industry and environmental protection.

She also stressed the importance of make breakthrough in important theories and key technologies of the mining industry and promote technologies that are highly energy-efficient, have low carbon emission levels and are conducive to the prevention of accidents. (Xinhua)

As I’ve said before countless times, innovation is something that policymakers talk about all the time, but no one really knows how to get results.

Most folks think that if you spend money on higher education, fund research, and make sure that capital can easily flow to start-up projects, then you will get innovation.

Of course, if it were that easy, many more countries would be filing patents in large quantities. They don’t for a variety of reasons, a big one being that doing all that stuff I mentioned in the previous paragraph costs a lot of money. Additionally, other facts are involved in whether people innovate, and we don’t really know how all this works.

All this being said, telling students and teachers that they should innovate, like it’s something that anyone can do with the proper motivation, is a bit silly.

Just thought I’d point that out.