In a Keynote Presentation by Dr. Christian Busch, Associate Director, Innovation and Co-Creation Lab, London School of Economics, he started by talking about global trends and challenges, with the key issues being cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), connectedness, the networked economy, new markets, and new demographics.
The overall theme was how innovation can progress in an ethical manner, using new ways of thinking about organisations and the distribution of power within them.
He touched on technical developments, such as how the smart home, cloud, voice control, AI come together to deliver increased flexibility, simplicity, and collaboration. Talking about the enterprise, Busch said there was a trend towards a sharing economy for customers and companies. This means there is no need for ownership of things but instead, only a requirement for access to them.
In practice, this means collaborative consumption such as the sharing of items from CDs to cars, in ways that are already happening in smaller communities across the world in both developing and developed economies. The world is full of idle resources, he said, and we should be able to share more – such as idle manufacturing resources and building site cranes.
Busch then updated Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which he described as self-centred and linear, in that people wait until until money has been made before deciding to do good works. Billgates was used as an example.
He said he sees another model emerging across the world – the enlightened circle of needs – which means not being too self-centred, and not waiting for time to elapse so as to undertake a behavioural shift to doing good while making money at the same time. It’s about action-driven purpose, in other words putting purpose before product, he said.
How to go about it? Busch said it was about building values within an organisation, a culture of learning not failure, championing others, not competing with them. From the point of view of governance, an organisation needs to work around new business models. As an example, he cited mobile operators who co-operate when it comes to sharing masts but compete at the retail level.
Busch said that we need to develop a culture of innovation where people talk about ideas not people or gossip, where effective networks can be built that combine the formal hierarchy with the way that decisions are taken in practice. An analogy is the way that companies accelerate the process of discovery of new compounds – it’s about curating serendipity by putting thinking people together – like chemistry.
Courtesy: NetEvents
