Do you sometimes wonder what innovations in the future will look like? What will the world need beyond the iPad and all-electric cars? How we will come up with ideas?
I do too.. And I don't have the answers. But I have a take on it. Here it is. A verbatim rambling from a speech I gave at a recent TiE conference in Bangalore. (Thanks to Management Next for sharing it back with me!)
Exploiting Platforms: Most of the innovative product & services you see these days come by exploiting an existing platform. This is not going to change.You leverage the platform and you add that extra thing that can be worth a lot of money. So my belief about the future of innovation, not just in the online space but also in other spaces, will depend on how you make use of and exploit huge platforms and focus on the incremental value that you bring and leverage the entire strength of the platform.Conversely, if you have a cool product today, see how you can make it into a platform where others can innovate. Whether it is software or a car.
Stop Consuming, Start Producing: We have become very good consumers of information. But new innovations don’t come if you are always in the consumption mode. Just look at the time we spend staring into our phones and tablets, consuming tweets, status updates, breaking news, all the time. At some point you got to stop and say ‘enough of this information, you have got to internalize, let me think and come up with something new.’ I know that this sounds backwards, but if you have kids, please get them a laptop of PC, not just a cool iPad. Why? Because you need such an environment to become a Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Wozniak. Not just a pretty screen where I can consume Facebook and play Angry Birds.
Power of Stillness: A lot of people ask me how we come up with new ideas at Bell Labs. Ideas often come out of brainstorming or with gathering lots of information and churning it away or using lateral thinking techniques. The good old ways of the past. They all work. But, there's a new way. It is what India has been preaching for centuries - telling people how to slow down. Stop talking, stop reading, calm down, sit and think that's how big ideas are going to come.Most brilliant ideas in the world have come by contemplating not just by constantly consuming and communicating. I think people will discover there is power in stillness. Steve Jobs was a huge believer in meditation. Taking time off to sit quietly and tapping into our creativity is very important.
Sustainability is not just a good thing to have: What we innovated before were things that worked great and looked reasonably good. All that we cared about was functionality and price, until iPhone came and people were suddenly willing to pay a lot more for design. So what's going to be the driver in the future? It's not just about the utility, price, or beauty of it. It is also important to have sustainability - are you innovating for a world where people don't want to see cars and cell towers in their cities?
Democratization: If I'm an expert in designing electric cars (note: this talk followed another by the founder of Reva, Electric Cars), I don't need to be at a university teaching, I can be at home and running a class over Skype and if I have talent people will pay for it . So if you look at how companies are hiring people these days, IT folks it’s not anymore about whether you are from an IIT or BITS. So suddenly everything has become democratized, where its only talent that matters, it doesn’t matter what the pedigree is. And we are also going towards a highly personalized world where cars, phones, services everything is going to be designed for the individual.
*applause and onions* ;-)
Next Generation Innovation - Power of Stillness and More
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thanks, vishy
innovate & impact
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