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TEDx Talks
Published: 2012-02-26
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKV3rhzvaC8
listen for films of all time is the princess bride even I knew that one of the main characters keeps on saying inconceivable and if partner in crime after hearing him say it over and over again pursuant 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's 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 here's why I think it's so important innovation is the process by which we change the world innovation to put it simply 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 no 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 it would also at Autodesk we think software tools we we make tools for people who make filming games we make tools for the people who design
and engineered the built environment and we make people we 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 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 then innovation is fundamentally not a corporate phenomenon you know innovation like instead involves taking risks involved breaking the rules and companies are particularly good at that in fact I'd say it's just the opposite companies are good at making rules and minimizing risk no one is classic book the innovator's 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 prudent and sound management also what I've observed over the time is that innovation fundamentally done by individuals you know the skills required imagination creativity problem solving those are all individual skills so what companies can do many things to encourage innovation I think the one thing they can best do it's harder the right people
so I think about it is a basketball team the Los Angeles Lakers are not great shooters Kobe Bryant is ever team wasn't and then it and if your team wasn't good enough what would you do would you hire a shooting coach would you try to get more players like Kobe so when I go around and I see companies that have innovation labs are 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 to be talking about innovation and despite my cynicism about the rituals and miss surrounded I think it's really important because we need innovation to solve the grand challenges of our civilization we needed to be able to do things like provide sustainable energy clean water
and ample food we're gonna 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 would like to talk about is five trends that are affecting innovation I'm really up my 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 printers were moving from only 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 book's what I'm really interested in is
the story and the kindle does a great job of giving me that story anywhere anytime I wanted same thing with music all I'm interested in owning us CD or record or even an iTunes file I want to listen to the music I love and Spotify gives me that experience the same thing with movies I want to watch movies with my friends and family and Netflix gives
me that experience I'm only move to the physical realm same thing is true thinking example like picture up for those who don't know about tech shop it's like a health club for geeks you mean 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 we do 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 in the crown is changing the fund it 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 wrist watch built on the iPod nano I tried to raise fifteen thousand dollars in two months he raised nearly a million dollars and that was watches selling the apple store what is amazing is that is for Scott what's more amazing in aggregate last year more than a or almost a hundred
million dollars was pledged to support twenty five thousand projects on no no the way that business is changing as the idea of open innovation and you know the basic idea nobody is a smart is everybody for more than ten years it was a particular problem that have baffled the research community about the HIV virus the post of the problem on the puzzle website folded and within
three weeks the community had solve the problem no used to be that was large corporations and government agencies that were doing all the innovation you know of a rocket science and that's the food eventually trickle down to small businesses and eventually to individuals like you and me but today it's all different it is likely that innovation is flowing upstream as it is flowing downstream so I
wasn't example when NASA went to build its new lunar lander rather than do it all by themselves he collaborated with a company called moon express moon expresses a small nimble company of some of the youngest and smartest engineers now the third Tring to want to talk about his diddle fabrication vigil fabrication is about designing things in computers and the and having them made with with computer
control 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 have really high quality in small quantities at moderate prices and those prices are going down everyday these technologies range
from additive technologies like three D. printing that you may have heard about all the way to biological processes that are being used for manufacturing so nowadays with increasingly affordable three D. printers we can print in a variety in materials we can pretend rubber we can print in plastic here's a boy recently made that I printed in metal and there is work going on in U. S.
see where the three D. printing buildings there's work to wake forest with the three D. printed a human kidney that little 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 could be able to make them in places like outer space people under the sea and the remote distant villages so for example a friend
of mine recently tried all three D. 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 three D. printer and prove to spare parts you actually need so moving from space delta things too small for the eye to see scientists in return researchers are now working on machines and devices at
the nanoscale here is a great example this is a nano robot that was designed at the beast institute at Harvard and the basic idea was to use yeah to create this clam shell like device and took target a particular cell when you reach that sell the clam shell would open and release of molecular payload in its first new stance stanchion 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 is becoming we where we worked on a small experiment with our friends at cal Gabriel Lopez's right here in the fridge in the front row and what we did is we re engineered you Cola equalize the bacteria that's in your gut it's
it's on your body I think the truth we make human stuff smell badly so what we did is we took a bunch of be coli and we re engineered the biological instructions that emit the chemicals that make it smell badly and we replaced them with different biological instructions and so what I'm holding here in my hand is billions of E. coli that now smell like bananas
now the fourth trend is about it 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 best use of the information available to us and for new information junkie like me this is completely incredible but is a vast is the information
on the web is it's also surprisingly local I live here in Berkeley I get all my news from a hyper local blog called Berkeley side %HESITATION I recently my interest had gone to things like building CNC machines building and designing them and the web is remarkably specific but going to websites like instructables another ones like it I can find the best amount of knowledge about and
admittedly secure subject and I have access to an entire community of people who are willing to share their knowledge with me about the subject and searches through the sources of information have changed the way we gather in searching collecting filter this information has also changed you're the New York times has the same all the news that's fit to print and for many years that was true
for maybe 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 vino tell me what's important and what I should be reading well there's a whole new realm of information coming at us and that's for the world of sensors
here's a century he was designed and built in Berkeley tiny arm it's she I can be power just from the energy in the air messengers are all around us they're making their way into consumer products I can now wear any of these consumer products and find out fit I am how will I slept or how stressed I and sutures are becoming the new things there are
gonna power the smart objects of the future whether that smart buildings or economists vehicles now the fifth trend I'd like to talk about is the infinite computer up until now I think we've been thinking about computers entirely wrong treating computing as always a scarce resource precious thing when actually it's limitless room almost infinite everybody knows about the power of computing you know it doubles every eighteen
months or so what that really translates into in my phone I have about thirty thousand times more computing power there was launched on the space shuttle but what 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 get it cheaper in fact the price of computing is approaching zero and
if you compare to any other assets energy labor commodities which you're 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 that is where it gets really interesting it used to be that if I want to solve a problem on a computer that what they took about ten thousand
seconds %HESITATION it costs about a dollar nowadays I can avert 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 shooting skills really well and the fourth one you think computing is becoming ubiquitous you know it's
in our phones it's in our cars if you nor buildings soon you 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 here you've now been handed one of the most powerful tools ever and it's virtually free so this morning I talked about trends that I think are affecting innovation and what I really think it's important is that it's E. individuals who break the rules who make those new innovations and the ones who were really successful at breaking the rules in effect what they're
really doing is creating the new rules I'm in a never ending cycle those new rules we'll 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 better time to innovate go out there and break the rules thank you
