Editor’s note: Greg Satell, a renowned business book author, was the keynote speaker at the recent event Waukesha County 2035, presented by BizTimes Media.
The digital revolution has favored the quick and agile over the large and encumbered. New business models disrupt industry giants with such metronomic regularity that we aren’t even surprised by it anymore. It just seems like the normal state of things.
With the end of Moore’s Law, however, we are entering a new era of innovation and we’re going to have to rethink agility for a post digital age. More specifically, we’re going to have to manage four shifts that will force us to think about widening and deepening connections rather than just moving fast and breaking things.
Shift 1: From transistor-based computers to new computing architectures
At first the end of Moore’s law, which posited computing power would double every two years, seems scary, because faster computer chips are what’s driven technological advancement over the past few decades. There’s little cause for alarm, though. It’s not as if there’s some 11th Commandment that says, “Thou shalt compute in ones and zeros.” There are other ways to compute things.
The two most promising candidates are quantum computing and neuromorphic chips, both of which are vastly different from digital computing, utilizing different logic and requiring different computer languages and algorithmic approaches than classical computers. The transition to these architectures won’t be seamless or easy. It’s important to start early.
Shift 2: From bits to atoms
The 20th century saw two major waves of innovation. The first, dominated by electricity and internal combustion, revolutionized how we could manipulate the physical world. The second, driven by quantum physics, microbial science and computing, transformed how we could work with the microscopic and the virtual.
The past few decades have been dominated by the digital revolution and it seems like things have been moving very fast, but looks can be deceiving. The impact from the first wave of innovation far surpassed what digital technologies have achieved.
The next era will combine aspects of both waves, essentially using bits to drive atoms. New techniques such as CRISPR help us edit genes at will. There is also an emerging revolution in materials science that will transform areas like energy and manufacturing. These trends are still somewhat nascent, but have truly transformative potential.
Shift 3: From rapid iteration to exploration
Over the past 30 years, we’ve had the luxury of working with technologies we understand extremely well. So it shouldn’t be surprising that rapid prototyping and iteration have emerged as key strategies.
Over the next decade or two, however, the challenge will be to learn to work with technologies we don’t understand well at all. There are also ethical issues involved with artificial intelligence and genomics that will require us to tread carefully.
So in the future, we will need to put greater emphasis on exploration to understand these new technologies and how they relate to our business. Instead of looking to disrupt markets, we will need to pursue grand challenges to solve fundamental problems.
4. From hypercompetition to mass collaboration
The competitive environment we’ve become used to has been relatively simple. For each particular industry, there have been distinct ecosystems based on established fields of expertise. Competing firms raced to transform fairly undifferentiated inputs into highly differentiated products and services. You needed to move fast to get an edge.
This new era, on the other hand, will be one of mass collaboration in which government partners with academia and industry to explore new technologies in the pre-competitive phase of technologies.
For example, the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research combines the work of five national labs, a dozen or so academic institutions and hundreds of companies to develop advanced batteries. Or, consider the manufacturing institutes set up under the Obama administration. Focusing on everything from advanced fabrics to composite materials to biopharmaceuticals, these institutes allow companies to collaborate with government labs and top academics to develop the next generation of technologies.
Over the past few decades, agility has largely meant moving faster and faster down a predetermined path. Over the next few decades, however, agility will take on a new meaning: the ability to explore multiple domains at once and combine them into something that produces value. We’ll need to learn how to go slower and collaborate more effectively to deliver much larger impacts. ν
