The Next Big Thing

Last year at the WorldFuture Conference, Thomas Frey of the DaVinci Institute offered up Eight Grand Challenges for humanity. If you look at these grand challenges, you will either be frustrated by their constraints, snicker at their impossibility or start trying to work out how they could actually happen. 

I didn’t think much about it when I first saw them, but there was an article in The Futurist recently that made me wonder about them again.  The article talked about structuring a prize mechanism around them.

What really spurred my thinking was based on some of the posts I’d done recently about gamification and business. From that perspective, I looked at how the challenges were structured -- What was measured and why? Why were the constraints so tight? Was there a clear goal? 

Then it made me think about if it is useful for businesses to define their own grand challenges to address. We live in a world of exponential change and potential, where the constraints that we have lived within may no longer exist. We need to start thinking about the opportunities differently.

The concept of having “grand challenges” may not require that they change the entire world. They just require a perspective on a different world. They may not even require they change the whole company. What are some grand challenges for IT going forward? How would you measure them? How would you award addressing them?

The greatest benefit to answering those questions would likely be that you put your vision down on paper in a way that can be quantified. We all know that IT organizations usually respond to that.

I was fortunate enough to spend a day at MIT this week in the Center for Digital Business talking with them about their research. A while back I wrote a post about the jobless recovery where I included a list to a short book from the CBD titled Race Against the Machine.

Near the end of the book the author talked about an example of how the current chess champion is not a machine or a person. Instead “the action moved to ‘freestyle’ competitions, allowing any combination of people and machines. The overall winner in a recent freestyle tournament had neither the best human players nor the most powerful computers. As Kasparov writes, it instead consisted of:

a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and 'coaching' their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. … Weak human +machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”

Although this was reported on a while ago, I still l believe this is an area where we’re going to see a great deal of effort in the near future. With the abundance of computing capability, and the optimization of resource usage based on their unique strength, whole new levels of productivity will be possible. It is clear that abstract pattern matching is an area where humans excel, and repeatable tasks are where automation a....
 
Organizations that recognize that and capitalize on the difference will excel.

I just saw this video of a set of robotic flying quadrotor drones flying in computer controlled formation that I found fascinating:

Maybe it was just the nearness of the Super Bowl, but I could see a whole other dimension of halftime show coming from this.

Seriously though, Roboticists at the University of Pennsylvania’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) lab are able to get as many as 20 of their autonomous microcopters to fly in formation and perform complex maneuvers flawlessly. They also have documented a series of videos showing bots flying hoops and building a tower-like structure.

It did make me wonder about where these techniques could be applied to business and what the risks associated with their use would be.

Phil McKinney who was once the Chief Technologist of the Personal Systems Group of HP has just written a book titled: Beyond The Obvious. I have not seen a copy yet, since it has not been released until Tuesday (Feb 7). I hope to get a chnace to see it at a book launch event, since I'll be in town.

Phil has been blogging on topics related to innovation for years. The publisher Hyperion has made Chapter 1: Why Questions Matter available as a free download. 

The following is an excerpt of a review recently published by Publishers Weekly.

”To help companies ignite these ideas, McKinney shares a system called the 'Killer Questions': a tool that prompts re-evaluation of old organizational beliefs that dictate how a company operates but which may no longer hold value. To do so requires negotiating the forces inside an organization that challenge innovation as well as dealing with outside curve balls.

While re-examining core beliefs is hardly new advice, McKinney's system helps distinguish valuable ideas from others with less potential as well as paying attention to delivering value to customers, the value chain, manufacturing and supply, marketing and sales, shipping and distribution, and the customer experience.

McKinney also provides an invaluable guide to extracting ideas from the book and applying them within an organization. He includes a helpful time line and six rules to keep companies on track. Offering concrete advice, McKinney gives organizations the tools they need to generate ideas and know that they're moving in the right direction."

You can look to the book’s site: www.BeyondTheObvious.com, if you’d like to know more.