Trend: When Every Company Has to Innovate As Fast as Apple Does!

The CEO’s are starting to notice.

That is, a lot of my clients (I do a lot of private, corporate off sites with major companies in addition to my conference and association keynotes) that the speed of change in their industry is increasingly being dictated by the speed of innovation of companies in the technology space.

I spoke about this on stage during my keynote for the Human Capital Institute Conference in New Orleans in 2010, in a clip, “When Every Company is Like Apple,” and spoke about the need to align our workforce for increasing speed.

The CEO’s are starting to notice, in that I’m getting an increasing number of bookings – leadership meetings and Board of Director meetings — that are focused on  the theme of ‘how do we align ourselves for faster change.’ My role — I do a full on keynote that outlines the trends impacting the organization, and then a series of interactive discussions in a workshop setting around the biggest opportunities and challenges faced by the organization.

I was quoted on the essence of this trend in Mashable in 2012 in an article, 9 Bold Predictions for the Digital World of 2020.

By 2020, if not before, most industries – health care, agriculture, financial – will have found that they have been transformed by the velocity of Moore’s law. Mobility, wireless, pervasive connectivity – everywhere we look, we see that the big trend for the next eight years is that technology will drive the pace of innovation in every single industry.

Credit cards will be replaced by smartphone transactions systems; auto insurance will be forever changed through GPS-based monitoring devices that reward good driving performance; hospitals will become virtual through the extension of bio-connectivity, involving remote medical monitoring and management.

The big trend is that as tech comes to change industries, change in those industries will occur faster than ever before. The winners will have been those who understand this reality, and adjust their innovation engine to keep up with this new speed of change.”

Jim Carroll, Futurist, Trends & Innovation Expert

I use the tag line “the future belongs to those who are fast” in many of my keynotes, whether on stage in Las Vegas or in small corporate settings with 20 senior executives. It’s not supposed to be just a snappy tag line (and the name of my latest book.) It’s also very much the reality that every industry finds itself in.

Is your organization positioned to be fast? Is Moore’s law and technology accelerating the rate of business model change, customer interaction methods, allowing the emergence of disruptive new competitors, and driving down profit margins? Then you had better be thinking about the role of innovation in order to assure you can align your organization to an increasingly fast future.