The rate of innovation increases everyday while disruption can come from anywhere. Around 40% of today’s largest Fortune 500 companies are expected to no longer exist within a decade. In this context, companies can’t solely depend upon the innovation from the inside hence collaboration becomes essential. Thus, open innovation and crowd based innovation projects are interesting choices to connect with optimal talent and address companies’ concrete challenges or those major ones from society. Peter Diamandis, author of the Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think and a popular TED Talk on the same topic, raises some fundamental issues in the video below on the changes we are addressing and which makes the collaboration fundamental between companies and the crowd to help overcome a future in constant change and affected by rapid innovation.
Firstly, Peter Diamandis assets six key points of what he defines as an era of exponential growth:
Digitalization.The exponential growth of computing has made the development of lots of stuff possible: Improvements in emerging manufacturing areas, like 3D printing, and the availability of knowledge for everybody, while forcing to a continuous learning. Something that goes digital has the potential for growth exponentially. We live in a hyper-connected world in which working in the cloud and identifying those who can address the companies’ challenges is easier, especially through platforms and open innovation intermediaries. As Diamandis points out, small teams can do the work that large companies used to do. Additionally, the time from getting an idea and creating a successful company has been reduced.
Deceptive. When something goes digital and grows exponentially, it is also deceptive in its growth, the author says. It starts growing in a flat line until it exploits and the growing curve goes up and disruption appears.
Disruption. Rapid innovation is forcing companies to disrupt themselves continuously to survive, before any other does. For that, they can no longer depend only on their internal innovation resources. So here, open innovation has an important role to play to boost collaboration.
Dematerialization. In the digital scenario, lots of physical things are becoming obsolete since innovation becomes faster and exponential.
Demonetarization. It is the consequence of the previous one.
Democratization. It is the last step. The rate of innovation explodes everywhere thanks to the increasing possibilities brought by technology, as Peter Diamandis points out in the video below. That forces enterprises to innovate continuously and look for collaboration to accelerate their processes.
As Peter Diamandis says, it is a time of abundance where we can produce faster and better, making technology and innovation accessible to large groups of people. And for that, open innovation and a collaborative and open mindset within companies are essential to connect talent and innovate faster.
