Change, recession, failure, silver linings. All of these and more were touched on by the major speakers at Day 1 of the World Innovation Forum. The day kicked off with futurist and Stanford professor Paul Saffo, who shared a framework for thinking about the context in which innovation is going to happen over the next decade.
The key to this moment in time, he said, is appreciating how profound the uncertainty is and not allowing our anxieties to arbitrarily narrow possibilities. Uncertainty is also opportunity. Step back and get context, and things start to make sense. At Innosight we often say that innovators should look for patterns when looking for where new innovationsmight come from. Saffo quoted Mark Twain in saying we should “look for things that ‘rhyme.’ ”
Echoing some of Scott Anthony’s thinking from The Silver Lining, Saffo told us that we should cherish failure because of its silver lining — the fact that progress is built on previous failures. Take a look at the S curve that describes innovation adoption, he said. The flat spot in the S curve is paved with the corpses of early innovation failures. “You’ll stand at the start of the curve and be convinced that takeoff is just around the corner,” but you should “never mistake a clear view for a short distance.”
So, if you are looking for success, he said, find something that’s been failing for 20 years. The first web companies were founded by refugees from failed interactive TV companies. We must not be afraid to fail.
Economies are done in by their successes, he said. They do themselves in because they do things so well. We moved from a producing economy to a consuming economy in the 1950s, when the time clock was surpassed by the credit card. The Consumer Economy ended on Sept. 14, 2008, with the bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers.
Saffo called our current economy the Creator Economy, whose participants consume and create simultaneously. This is not a new thought, but he took it some interesting places. Google is the real indicator of the Creator Economy, he said, because it taps the smallest unit of a creator act: the search string.
Don’t fear change, embrace it, he urged. The new thing will not support the weight of the old thing. Better to start a lightweight small thing and build on it.
