Meaningful innovation needs novel delivery avenues, vision, and most importantly, a co-ordinated, focussed effort from existing industry, the innovators, and top-level legislators to precipitate.
In an age where the speed from technological breakthrough to implementation in-market is accelerating to warp speed, “after” is too late.
This isn’t going to change overnight. Countries that succeed in becoming beds for empowering that effort will become the world leaders in meaningful innovation.There are still some challenges faced even by the giants, however. These are around regulation and legislation, vision and direction, and smart talent acquisition.
A current crisis — billions of dollars being objectively wasted on ventures that flop within a few months of inception, while amazingly delivering almost zero value to humanity bar a handful of individuals — in part arises from most ventures in technological innovation being purely profit-driven. Investment comes in a frenzied flurry from actors who are looking to inflate their interests. This brings us back to that fundamental flaw in the way we have constructed our economy and society over the last few hundred years or so; I won’t dive into that here.
What we can change right now is our mindset, from the get-go. Rather than wasting the advantages that technological innovation empowers us with to hop skip and jump around legislation, tax, and leech off existing infrastructure (almost every tech unicorn?) we can direct that supercharged, golden opportunity to deliver truly radical, democratising technologies to the entire world.
We need to create fundamental change to how we exist, rather than going down a profit versus non-profit rabbit hole — an absolute waste of time. We need co-ordinated, focussed collaboration between innovators, legislators, and existing industries to deliver radical changes to the entire world.
I love ideas like what3words, www.what3words.com. A true example of the beauty and power that co-ordinated, fundamental innovation can deliver, it’s something all budding founders and innovators can learn from.