I to N of Startup Innovation: HOW TO BUILD AN INNOVATION PRACTICE

Innovation in a Hyper-Connected World. We look at startups and organizations across all industries and dissect how they apply innovation in a sustainable and systemic way. And that really is the essence of this book to help you better understand how to apply innovation within your Start-up’s context. Now I have to tell you that a lot of this has to be very practical nuts and bolts advice.

Well, look at the mechanics of innovation and the process of innovation. So how do you begin such an enormous discussion?

Well let me start by asking you a very simple question: Do you believe that everything great has already been invented.

Few of us would subscribe to this notion right.

But what if I were to tell you that we actually behave it is the behaviors of our organizations that define their culture and most often it's that culture that inhibits and prevents innovation from flourishing and becoming a process and being sustainable. And that's really what we would like to specialize in.

So, if I were to ask you to summarize in a single word what it is that's creating all this tremendous momentum in this fuel for innovation.

What would that word be and what if that same word was to answer the question of how do we move forward over the course of the next 200 years.

How do we deal with the complexity of climate change, how do we deal with the potential of pandemics, how do we deal with very complex supply chains? All these issues are ultimately brought together by a single concept and that is the concept of ‘Connections’.

And that's part of what I want to focus on as the driver for innovation, the connectivity that we create and that we will create and I'll show you some numbers in just a minute.

Really is the fuel that is motivating innovation in inspiring so many of us to think about innovation in a more scientific and more rigorous fashion. Over the course of the last 60 years, we've seen a tremendous explosion in the amount of connectivity not just between person to person and person the machine not even just machine to machine but today between all objects when we talk about the Internet of Things and the Internet of everything.

We will look at how this kind of activity is creating a tremendously rich environment for innovation.

Let's put some numbers on it before we go any further.

While today we have 10 billion total user computing devices back in 1960 when we have 1000 and we've clearly gone through many generations of different types of devices from mainframes to departmental computers to PCs to laptops.

Of course, now mobile devices and tablets and even wearable are the notions of what a computing device is changing in and of itself and we'll see more about that in just a minute.

But I want to pay attention to the fact that in every decade what's happened is fascinating and very consistent we've increased the number of users mean devices by one order of magnitude and that's been a very consistent trend all the way up to the present.

So, as we move forward these devices change, they become wearable devices, inhalable devices that will be part of our food supply, and the medicines that we take.

What might that connected world look like?

We look at the 20th century as an example every time we try to move into the future we would so regularly slowly and a lot and we would bounce off of this wall.

We didn't go directly from the present to the future.

In fact, what we did is we took this rather circuitous route through many generations of different technologies to communicate and to collaborate.

And along come your mother and grandmother very suddenly and slingshots into the future using a tablet or a smartphone. That slingshot is what happens when technology finally becomes so affordable it becomes so usable and so simple that there's no excuse not to use it.