How innovation keeps proving the catastrophists wrong!

Throughout time there have always been those trying to stop the forces of progress. Fear of the new and fear of technology, has been the stuff of both horror and science fiction and of many dystopian visions of the future.

Today, too often in the name of good stewardship of our plant, there are those that believe we need a simpler world. One where we go back to the land, to the farm, to a kind of Thoreau like localism. The fact is the world is moving toward cities, technological progress is a force of nature that cannot be stopped and globalization is a genie that will not be put back into the proverbial bottle.

So how do we accept all of this, and still see a future that is livable, sustainable, and provides for our needs and still protects our food, our air, our water and our climate? The answer lies in technology  and in innovation that is, as Robert Bryce says, Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper.

My conversation with Robert Bryce:

Only the paranoid and fast will survive

SLR cameras, pagers, paper maps, travel agents, home telephones, answering machines, transistor radios; all quaint reminders of days gone by. Today whole new industries are taking over from the old. The way we find places to stay when we travel, transportation, even the nature of money itself, is changing.

Back in the 90’s we heard about the “Innovators Dilemma.” About how cheap products would flood the market, before other manufactures could create products with higher value. Perhaps Sony and other Japanese companies were the penultimate example.

Today, new products enter the marketplace full blown. They are cheaper and more efficient and receive instant acceptance. How do traditional incumbents defend against this? They don’t. They either innovate on today’s terms, or they go the way of Blockbuster, or Blackberry or Kodak, or Garmin.

These are just some of the ideas put forth by Larry Downes in his new book, Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation.
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My conversation with Larry Downes: