TEDxBerkeley - Carl Bass - The New Rules of Innovation

one of my favorite films of all time is the Princess Bride in it and in it one of the main characters keeps on saying inconceivable and his partner-in-crime after hearing him saying it over and over again turns him and says you keep using that word I do not think it means what you think it means and I think the same thing can be said about innovation everybody is using the word but I do not think it means what they think it means so why is everybody talking about innovation after all it's not invention it's not scientific discovery and certainly not mathematical proof but here's why I think it's so important innovation is the process by which we change the world innovation to put it simply is about making things better it's about making things better insignificant and hopefully meaningful ways it's the practical application of ideas and technologies to make new and better things now innovation is hard it requires taking chances it requires challenging those things we think we know with certainty it's about taking risks and breaking the rules we're not at Autodesk we make software tools we make tools for people who make filming games we make tools for the people who design and engineer the built environment and we make people and we make tools for people who design and manufacture the things that are all around us I feel very fortunate to work with such awesome people who make such incredible things and it's forced me to think a lot about innovation because nearly every company I know wants to be more innovative and after having thought about it for a long time I've come to the conclusion that innovation is fundamentally not a corporate phenomenon you know innovation like I said it involves taking and involves breaking the rules and companies aren't particularly good at that in fact I'd say it's just the opposite companies are good at making rules and minimizing risk now in this classic book the innovators dilemma Clayton Christensen does a great job of explaining that the lack of innovation is not a failure of companies but rather it's the result of prudent and sound management now so what I've observed over the time is that innovation is fundamentally done by individuals you know the skills required imagination creativity problem-solving those are all individual skills so while companies can do many things to encourage innovation I think the one thing they can best do is hire the right people so I think about it as a basketball team the Los Angeles Lakers are not great shooters Kobe Bryant is and if your team wasn't and it and if your team wasn't good enough what would you do would you hire a shooting coach or would you try to get more players like Kobe so when I go around and I see companies that have innovation labs or innovation frameworks or an army of innovation consultants I get the sinking feeling their products are really going to suck now I think it's important to be talking about innovation and despite my cynicism about the rituals and myths around it I think it's really important because we need innovation to solve the Grand Challenges of our civilization we need it to be able to do things like provide sustainable energy clean water and ample food we're going to need to build infrastructure to deal with urbanization on a scale that we've never seen before and on the commercial level companies in order to compete need to be more innovative so the argument I'd like to make this morning what I'd like to talk about is five trends that are affecting innovation my thesis is that innovation is happening at an unprecedented pace and it's going to continue to accelerate because of these five trends so the first trend is we're moving from owning products to accessing experiences so why did borders go out of business is it because we no longer wanted books or music or movies of course not we just wanted to access them differently so if you think about books what I'm really interested in is the story and the Kindle does a great job of giving me that story anywhere and anytime I want it same thing with music I'm not interested in owning us a CD or a record or even an iTunes file I want to listen to the music I love and Spotify gives me that experience it's the same thing with movies I want to watch movies with my friends and family and Netflix gives me that experience and when we move to the physical realm same thing is true take an example like TechShop for those of you don't know about tech shop it's like a health club for geeks you you pay a monthly fee and you get access to a fully equipped workshop and what people want is the experience of expressing themselves creatively and making things for themselves what they're not interested in is the hassle of an expense of maintaining all that kind of equipment now the second trend is the way that businesses are doing business differently you know the power of the cloud and the crowd is changing the funded fundamental economics in industry after industry and destroying traditional ways of doing business so take Kickstarter for an example many you may know the story of Scott Wilson he was an industrial designer he struck out on his own to build a wristwatch built on the iPod Nano he tried to raise $15,000 in two months he raised nearly a million dollars and now his watches sell in the Apple Store but as amazing as that is for Scott what's more amazing in aggregate last year more than uh or almost a hundred million dollars was pledged to support twenty five thousand projects on Kickstarter now another way that business is changing is the idea of open innovation and you know the basic idea nobody is as smart as everybody for more than ten years there was a particular problem that had baffled the research community about the HIV virus they posted the problem on the puzzle website folded and within three weeks the community had solved the problem now it used to be that it was large corporations and government agencies that were doing all the innovation you know all the rocket science and that stuff would eventually trickle down to smaller businesses and eventually to individuals like you and me but today it's all different it's as likely that innovation is flowing upstream as it is flowing downstream so as an example when NASA went to build its new lunar lander rather than do it all by themselves they collaborated with a company called moon express moon express is a small nimble company of some of the youngest and smartest engineers now the third trend I want to talk about is digital fabrication digital fabrication is about designing things and computers and having them made with computer-controlled technology it is changing the rules about how things are made it's changing the rules of the industrial revolution it used to be in order to have things that were high quality and low price we had to make large quantities of them today we can make things of really high quality in small quantities at moderate prices and those prices are going down every day these technologies range from additive technologies like 3d printing that you may have heard about all the way to biological processes that are being used for manufacturing so nowadays with increasingly affordable 3d printers we can print in a variety materials we can print in rubber we can print in plastic here's a bowl I recently made that I printed in metal and there's work going on at USC where they're 3d printing buildings and there's work at Wake Forest where they've 3d printed a human kidney now digital fabrication isn't just about the things that we're now able to make it's also about where we're able to make them we're going to be able to make them in places like outer space deep under the sea and in remote distant villages so for example a friend of mine recently tried out 3d printing in zero-gravity and the basic idea is rather than bring a complete inventory of every spare part you might need why not bring a 3d printer and print the spare parts you actually need so moving from space down to things too small for the eye to see scientists and researchers are now working on machines and devices at the nano scale here's a great example this is a nano robot that was designed at the VESA Institute at Harvard and the basic idea was to use DNA to create this clamshell light device and target a particular cell when it reached that cell the clamshell would open and release its molecular payload in its first instance tan XI ation the idea was to target cancer cells and release a chemical intended to kill the cancerous cells now just to show you how real this world of synthetic biology is becoming we weren't we worked on a small experiment with our friends at Cal Gabriel Lopez is right here in the in the front row and what we did is we re-engineered ecoli ecoli is the bacteria that's in your gut it sits on your body it's it's the things that truthfully make human stuff smelled badly so what we did is we took a bunch of e.coli and we re-engineered the biological instructions that emit the chemicals that make it smell badly and we replace them with different biological instructions and so what I'm holding here in my hand is billions of eco by that now smell like bananas now the fourth trend is about information and the rise of information I grew up thinking that all the information in the world was at the card catalog at the local public library well I I was wrong I now know the vastness of the information available to us and for an information junkie like me this is completely incredible but as vast as the information on the web is it's also surprisingly local I live here in Berkeley I get all my news from a hyperlocal blog called Berkeley Side and recently my interests have gone to things like building CNC machines building and designing them and the web is remarkably specific by going to websites like Instructables and other ones like it I can find a vast amount of knowledge about an admittedly obscure subject and I have access to an entire community of people who are willing to share their knowledge with me about the subject and so just as the sources of information have changed the way we gather in search and collect and filter this information has also changed you know the New York Times has this saying all the news that's fit to print and for many years that was true for me the editors at the New York Times decided what was important for me to read nowadays is completely different I've assembled my own network of people whose opinions I value and respect and I follow them on Twitter and they now tell me what's important and what I should be reading now there's a whole new realm of information coming at us and that's from the world of sensors here's a sensor it was designed and built in Berkeley it's tiny it's cheap and it can be powered just from the energy in the air now sensors are all around us they're making their way into consumer products I can now wear any of these consumer products and find out a fit I am how well I've slept or how stressed I am and sensors are coming the means that are going to power the smart objects of the future whether that smart buildings or autonomous vehicles now the fifth trend I'd like to talk about is infinite computing up until now I think we've been thinking about computing entirely wrong in treating computing as though it was a scarce resource a precious thing when actually it's limitless free almost infinite everybody knows about the power of computing you know it doubles every 18 months or so what that really translates into in my phone I have about thirty thousand times more computing power than was launched on the space shuttle but when it also means through that same device I have access to more computing power than existed on the entire planet just five years ago and computing is getting cheaper in fact the price of computing is approaching zero and if you compare it to any other asset energy labor commodities which are all going up in price computing is coming down in price and doing predictably so literally today computing is the cheapest asset I can deploy against any problem now this where it gets really interesting it used to be that if I wanted to solve a problem on my computer that let's say took about ten thousand seconds it would cost about $1 nowadays I can invert this whole equation and what I'm able to do is run it on ten thousand computers and get the answer in a matter of seconds for the same price this is truly profound the way that computing is scaling unlike humans computing scales really well and the fourth one is that computing is becoming ubiquitous you know it's in our phones it's in our cars it's in our buildings soon it will be in our clothing and it will probably end up in our bodies so like I said I think we've been thinking about computing entirely wrong we have to stop treating it as a scarce and precious resource and start dealing it dealing with it as the infinite resource that it really is regardless of what domain you're working in you've now been handed one of the most powerful tools ever and it's virtually free so this morning I talked about the trends that I think are affecting innovation and what I really think is important is that it's individuals who break the rules who make those new innovations and the ones who are really successful at breaking the rules in effect what they're really doing is creating the new rules and in a never-ending cycle those new rules will have to be broken as well so while the challenges I think we face are daunting I've never been more optimistic about our ability to solve them there's never been a greater need or a better time to innovate go out there and break the rules thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 204,582

Rating: 4.825911 out of 5

Keywords: Technology, tedx talks, Business, TEDxBerkeley, tedx talk, ted, ted x, ted talks, English, ted talk, USA, tedx

Id: YKV3rhzvaC8

Length: 17min 32sec (1052 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2012