The air date for the five part CNBC series, “The Business of Innovation,” hosted by Maria Bartiromo, has finally been set: it will air March 4, at 9PM EST, and again at midnight. It will air in Europe and Asia subsequent to that.
I’m a featured guest expert on the show, chatting about what companies must do to instill a culture of innovation.
What’s happening with our worforce? That is increasingly the focus of many of my recent talks.
Yesterday I spoke to the staff and faculty of the University of Oklahoma College of Continuing Education / College of Liberal Studies.
The overall theme was “innovation in the world of high velocity education.”
Broadly, my talk was based around one of my favorite quotes: that of educator Lewis Perelman: “Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.”
There’s a lot of opportunity for innovation in any educational institution: innovating with the methodology of education upgrading, new knowledge opportunities, and innovation in the overall administration and delivery of education. Beyond that, there’s the overall issue of ensuring that in a high-velocity world, educators are delivering the right knowledge at the right time for the right purpose.
To that end, I outlined what I believe to be the primary areas for innovation:
There’s more to be found in my list of “10 big trends for educators,” and many of my assumptions as to where we are going in the world of education is based upon my listing of “10 Unique Characteristics of 21st Century Skills.”
In the world of high-velocity change, how could you go about actually keeping on top of all the trends that might impact your business models, customers, distribution channels, competitors, and markets?
How do you develop a forward-oriented culture that allows you to immerse yourself in the developments occurring in the global innovation feedback loop, and provide for relentless, effective innovation in everything that you do?
With many of my clients, I walk through the “trends and innovation loop” : it’s a model that I developed a number of years ago. It’s a methodology, and a way of thinking, that can help engender an ongoing culture of innovation. There are several elements to the loop, all of which are always operating full-speed, flat-out:
A LAST WORD
The key to the trends and innovation loop is that it is an ongoing, regular process. It must become part of the very fabric of the organization. A key point to the loop – to make it work, there must be a clear understanding that everyone in the organization is responsible for observing important trends that might impact the organization, for generating innovative ideas, and for helping to put those ideas into practice. Without that type of understanding throughout the organization, most efforts at innovation and dealing with the future will be doomed to fail.
I’m doing a private conference call today with more than a hundred executives in the life sciences industry, on behalf of my client, SAP.
The theme, “Velocity, Agility, Complexity, and Flexibility: The Four Key Drivers for Competitive Advantage,” drives directly from the key theme in my trends overview: Future Medicine: Prescriptions for 21st Century Health Care.
Together, the panel will discuss the challenges they face every business day in the high-velocity pharmaceutical industry, and how innovation plays a core role in how they approach to tackling the challenges and opportunities that exist. In the call, we’ll talk to these executives as to what they have been doing within the pharmaceutical and health care industry to:
Over the last few years, I’ve spent time with dozens of these types of panels with companies in every industry sector, and there is a huge amount of innovative insight that I’ve studied. In the case of today’s panelists, they’ve discovered such unique areas for innovation in manufacturing/planning; streamlining the “chain of custody” process in manufacturing, and how they have provided for innovation in how they manage volume discounts. As one panelist noted, “we get a few big wins and a lot of small wins, but the small wins really add up!”
That’s a key point about innovation: it isn’t just about hitting home runs. You can be innovative as heck by hitting doubles, singles, and triples, and getting the runs in.
For further background, read Future Medicine: Prescriptions for 21st Century Health Care
Jim opened a conference of leading financial, banking and investment professionals, at an event attended by the Governor, Mr. Stuart Jack, CVO, as well as the majority of Cabinet members of the British Territory.
Jim’s talk focused on the rapid pace of change with the provision of professional and financial services, and the innovation challenges that the small island-nation should pursue in the era of rapid consolidation of global wealth into the
Well, for one thing, when light stops, velocity picks up!
A few weeks ago, I keynoted a crowd of 3,000 telecom professionals in Florida. One of the comments I made was this: when it comes to the velocity of change in the “big media universe,” we can only expect that the bandwidth and computing power in our lives will become ever more plentiful, and ever faster, because scientists are figuring out how to slow light to a crawl.
That’s important, because it migrates us from a world of “electronics based computing” to “photonics computing.” The difference in speed, capacity, processing power and everything else will be simply staggering. Think optical-chips based on light, not today’s model-T’s based on electrons.
This trend will make the electronic computers of today look like Cro-Magnon tools compared to the optical computers of tomorrow.
Last week, I caught an article in which the folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) predicted that optical chips will be here within 5 years
A year ago, at another telecom event in Florida, I made the then bold prediction that as scientists learn to stop light, we’ll see bandwidth improvements of a huge degree. Some industry folks in the room were taken aback: it’s kind of interesting to read the article that was printed at the time (found below.)
It’s awful nice to see predictions of the past become mainstream quicker than you might have expected!
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Optical Futures: Another ET Look at Light
24 January 2006
CT’s Pipeline
Among the many intriguing observations and reports shared by the SCTE Conference on Emerging Technologies keynoter Jim Carroll in Tampa two weeks ago was the progress that optical researchers were making on the question of how to slow down light.
In our ET report in last week’s Pipeline, we’d written on how it might have been interesting to have one of the industry’s many optical experts comment on “when, where and how this could happen.” Since then, we’ve heard back from the futurist Carroll and checked in with one of those experts.
“The slowing of light is nothing new,” Carroll wrote, referring to New York Times article from last November that cited Harvard researchers who in 1999 who were able to slow light drastically and two years later were able to bring light to a stop.
Of most interest to Carroll about this science project, which already was well under way six years ago, is its new scale. Whereas the Harvard researchers required a roomful of equipment, according to the Times, IBM scientists now have created a tiny silicon device to slow down light from its usual 186,000 miles per second to 600 miles per second–or to about 0.3 percent of ordinary light speed.
“Heck, I could have a little light-stop-chip in my laptop some time in the future, plug into my optical-wall-plug, and access the yottabit universe,” Carroll wrote.
There’s no quibbling with ability of a wide-ranging, connect-the-dots futurist such as Carroll in getting those (trade journalists included) who may be stuck in a particular niche to drop the blinders and look around, and ahead. His talk certainly was an effective way to jolt ET attendees into a forward- leaning frame of mind.
New optical thinking
For input from one of the industry’s optical experts, we turned to OpVista CTO Dr. Winston Way, who noted up front how thinking about optical networking already is undergoing a shift.
“Before, people only thought that you could manage packets, frames or bytes, but I think right now people have just started to think about the fact that light, or colors, can be managed also,” Way said. One of OpVista’s calling cards is its novel approach to reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs).
As for not simply managing, but arresting lightwaves, Way said: “I think that is really out-of-the-box thinking. It’s interesting. Slow it down so you can see what’s inside, then let it go again.”
Way said this project reminded him of work done at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 1980s and early 1990s on optical signal processing, which sidestepped the physical limitations of the electronics domain. “I’m not sure it’s practical today,” he said.
What Carroll was talking about, of course, was not today but tomorrow, or rather the day or year (or decade?) after. “I don’t make my stuff up,” Carroll wrote. “The future surrounds us, is being developed all around us and all the (technologies) that people work on eventually come into our lives. I just think…that it is going to come into our lives quicker than we might think.”
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