Carl Bass heads one of the world’s biggest design and engineering software-making companies, but he believes that innovation must come from the individual and not the company. Innovation, he says, requires taking risks and breaking rules, which goes against good management. The responsibility of creativity and problem-solving is therefore on employees’ shoulders.
Bass identifies five trends that have transformed the innovative space in recent times:
1) Moving from owning products to accessing experiences
Bookstores, music stores and DVD stores have been suffering under the onslaught of e-commerce and digital media platforms like Kindle, Spotify and Netflix. Book sales haven’t fallen because people don’t want to read. It’s because they want to access their reading or movie-watching experiences differently. Ease of access has become far more important to the entertainment consumer than ownership and maintenance of the products. Entertainment providers who are tapping into this need have a better future than those who aren’t.
2) Business un-usual
Companies are doing business differently than they used to, and finding new ways to solve problem. The power of “crowd and cloud” can be seen through platforms like Kickstarter, which helps innovators find funding and is itself a radical way of promoting businesses. Kickstarter helps raise millions of dollars for thousands of projects each year and has become the big daddy of startups. Innovations are flowing upstream as much as they’re flowing downstream – the NASA Lunar Lander was launched in collaboration with a firm of young scientists called Moon Express. As the mantra goes, Nobody is as smart as everybody.
3) Digital fabrication
Computers used to change the way problems were solved. Now they’re also changing the way things are made. Conventional manufacturing wisdom said that to make high quality products at low price, you had to make large quantities of it. Today we can make high quality products in low quantity, at moderate prices which are going down every day. Robotics, biological technologies and 3D printing are increasingly taking over manufacturing processes. Everything from clothes to kidneys can be digitally fabricated. It’s a whole new Industrial Revolution.
4) Rise of information
As vast as the internet’s ocean of information is, it’s also very local. Users can customise their intake and zero down on the specific information they need, be it about an obscure technical subject or the news in their neighbourhood. We’ve trained ourselves in picking out what we need from all the clutter. As the sources of information have changed, so has the way we search, filter and gather data. Information is provided to us in newer ways every day – such as through sensors, which are possibly the smart objects of the future.
5) Infinite computing
A single computer can work on a problem for 10,000 seconds for the price of a dollar, which is the same price as engaging 10,000 computers to work on a problem for one second. Unlike humans, computers scale really effectively. We’ve been treating computing as if it were a scarce and precious resource whereas actually it’s limitless, and now almost ubiquitous. With the cost of cloud computing in the western world approaching zero, it’s time for people in every field to realise they’ve been handed one of the most powerful tools in history – almost for free.
According to Bass, individuals who break the rules and come up with successful innovations are in effect creating the new rules. And in a never ending cycle, those new rules will have to be broken too.