Jim Carroll- Futurist, Trends & Innovation Keynote Speaker

What happens when the world goes “real time?” When we’ve got the capability to process vast amounts of information to see what is really going on, and we can make decisions based on what we see?

"Competing with analytics - the next billion dollar industry"

We witness the birth of new billion dollar industries. Massive business model disruption. The rapid emergence of fascinating new solutions to complex problems. We get some pretty BIG and exciting stuff!

Back in December, I was invited to be the opening keynote speaker for the annual users group conference for Siemens XHQ in Orlando.

XHQ is a specialized division of the company that focuses on the provision of specialized software that helps organizations to manage their business in “real time.”  In other words, tools and insight that let you drill down into vast quantities of real time information in order to make better operational decisions, whether in manufacturing, the utilities sector, energy companies or elsewhere.

It was exciting to be a part of this, since I have been predicting for years that one of the biggest trends in the future is that organizations would find their operations, business models, and opportunities for innovation explode as the field of ‘real time analytics’ matures.

For example, I wrote one blog post a few years, back — “Competing with analytics – the next billion dollar industry” — which itself was based on my “What Comes Next?” trends document, which suggests that “aanalytics is hot….it’s where the next-billion dollar industries will be born!”

Take a look at that document – and the section “Revenge of the Math Geeks”, where I make the comment, “Remember those kids in school who were really good at math? They own the future!”

I speak about analytics in a wide variety of industries. In the world of health care, I’ve been speaking about the potential for analytics as a disease / condition predictive management tool for almost a decade. Take a look at my document, “It’s January 15, 2020: Do You Know Where Your Healthcare System Is?” for some insight into the role of analytics in that field.

And in another previous blog post about future trends, I wrote that “the future is owned by the math geeks. We’re entering an era in which extremely intelligent people who know a lot about how to throw a bunch of computers at a complex problem in order to come up with interesting solutions.”

So it fascinating to see an article appear in Network World (“Health provider wants algorithm that can predict illness, Network World, March 29, 2011″) covered the looming role of analytical, real time data mining in the world of health care.

The article covered the plans of a health provider, Health Provider Network, “to do for healthcare what technology in the film “Minority Report” did for police work” — and that is, real time aanalytics to predict emerging health conditions:

“it wants to use technology to pre-emptively predict when illness is likely to strike and take measures to prevent costly hospitalizations. This week Heritage announced that it was offering a prize of $3 million for any developer who successfully created a “breakthrough algorithm that uses available patient data, including health records and claims data, to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations.”

Exactly! Back in 2008, I keynoted the Institute of Actuaries, and noted that we were entering a world in which we would see fascinating new developments in the world of health care with predictive aanalytics. There’s a blog post, ‘Computational Plastics is another new plastic“, that is well worth a read.

This is but one small example of where analytics is emerging as a force to reckon with. If you want to ride a trend, this is a big one.

Analytics is hot, and getting hotter!

Hundreds of thousands have seen Jim Carroll on stage with a keynote focused on future trends, innovation & creativity....with a focus on the trends that will drive their future.

How SMALL is your world? Are you thinking BIG enough in terms of just how many big trends are going to impact your future?

Many people ask me how I spend my time in nailing many of the trends that will redefine society, industries, markets and nations into the future….

It involves a lot of research and a great deal of listening to other experts. But it also comes from the fact that I spend my time as a speaker at corporate meetings, massive association events and board retreats, with the resultant opportunity of seeing what many of the most innovative organizations in the world are focused upon. Just take a look at my client list, and you’ll get a sense that I have a constant stream of global executive level insight that drives my view of the future. Take a look at the track record of what I’ve been up to. There’s some pretty solid and significant insight happening here. Take a look at what world class innovators do that others don’t do.

My trending observations also involves a lot of common sense. Take the “expectation gap” which I outline below. This is a pretty significant trend, and it’s pretty well blindingly obvious when you think about it,

So what comes next? Here’s a quick list of 10 trends that you could be thinking about as we go into 2011. I’ve got dozens — no, hundreds — more. Hang out on this blog, track my thoughts, jump in, and let’s continue to innovate our way into the future!

• the expectation gap: it’s one of the most obvious, most significant, and most challenging trends going forward into the future. Quite simply, Western society is defined by an increasing divergence between what people expect, and what they will get. People expect the world’s greatest health care services; with the aging of society, it is dramatically clear that the system won’t be able to deliver what they expect. Boomers expect that they will have a comfortable retirement pensions; the economic reset and collapsing home values have made it increasingly clear that their hopes will likely have been dashed. People expect that they can live longer, but the increasing prevalence of lifestyle diseases due to obesity and other factors means that in some areas of the Western world, 60 is the new 70. People expect that they can reduce the size of “big government” but have no sense of just how to go about doing this without a great deal of pain. Whatever the case may be, our future is increasingly defined by this gap, and it is going to have huge ramifications for just about everything around us. And here’s the reality: a lot of organizations are going to make a lot of money in helping to close the gap! Take health care and what is really going to happen in terms of future trends. Huge opportunities for growth!

• industries blur: In the past, we’ve have “industries” which have focused on particular products and markets. Increasingly, the concept of an “industry” is going to blur as fascinating new trends provide interesting new opportunities. Consider this: the world of fashion and healthcare are going to merge. We are going to see an increasing number of bio-connectivity health care devices that will be used for the remote monitoring of health care conditions. Quite simply, people will increasingly wear small “smart appliances” that will monitor their compliance with exercise programs or that will keep their doctors up to date with key health indicators. But people won’t want to wear medical appliances though: they’ll want to wear fashion! Health-care jewelry anyone?
• energy gets smart: Clearly we’re going to see continued high-speed innovation with renewable energy sources, and velocity with grid-parity: the point in time at which the cost of producing renewable energy equals that of carbon based sources. Much of this is coming about as Silicon Valley gets aggressively involved in the energy sector Taiwan Semiconductor, one of the largest chip manufacturers in the world, has invested $193 million in solar-cell maker Motech Industries. That’s but a small example of a major trend in which hi-tech companies are getting aggressively involved in every single aspect of the renewable energy marketplace. Just look at what Google is up to with wind-farms off the Eastern Seaboard!
• the collapse of attention spans: Everything changes when people lose their ability to focus: sports, shopping, living…..the numbers with the next generation of consumers are simply staggering. The average teen sent 435 text messages per month in 2007; it’s now 2899! That’s 97 messages per day, an increase of 566% in just a few years. It’s estimated that they now spend 7.5 hours a day engaged with some type of media screen; if you add in the fact they are multitasking, it comes out to 11 hours of screen time per day — or 53 hours a week. Thats’ more time than involved in a full time job, and more time than their parents spend at work. What’s the impact? Continued hyper-speed in the evolution of branding and advertising; surreal rates of change involving products and services; unbelievable rates of change in how decisions are made and people are influenced. If you don’t know how to think, market and promote at nano-speeds, you’re not ready for the future!
• faster market evolution: If we’re thinking faster, than we are innovating faster! New products flood the market at ever increasing speeds, and fast-consumers snap them up in a moment and evolve their lifestyles quicker. We’re all going to begin moving at Apple-speed as Silicon Valley increasingly comes to control the pace of innovation in many industries. Put it this way: it took two years for Apple to sell two million iPhones, but only 2 months for them to sell 2 million iPads! And just about a month to sell 1 million iPhone 4′s! We’re seeing the same trend in many other industries and product lines: the business of outsourcing the manufacturing LCD TV’s exploded from $9.4 billion in 2009 to over $21 billion in 2010, and an estimated $30 billion in 2011. Some products are obsolete before they are released: Lenovo learned this fact when they cancelled their planned “tablet computer” this June due to the unbelievably fast success of the iPod with market domination.
• innovation partnerships. Given this rate of change, companies are quickly learning that in this fast paced world, they can’t innovate on their own; it is simply too difficult to keep up. And they’ve realized that they can enjoy greater success through open innovation and other external innovation partnerships. A great example of what happens when innovation “opens up” is seen with the partnership between consumer appliance maker Phillips and Sarah Lee on the single-serving coffee machines. It’s a market that grew from nothing to 12 million machines and 7 billion coffee “pods” in just 5 short years! Everywhere I go, I see organizations focused on challenging the core concepts of how they do “new things.” There’s a new mindset, and this is going to drive a big part of the growth for organizations going into the future.
• the fight against workplace boredom. When there’s so much fun and fast change in the world, a job can be a mind-numbing experience. That’s why one survey suggested that 67% of Gen-Y admitted on their very first day on a new job, they were already thinking about another job. Organizations are fighting back against boredom by trying to keep staff engaged. At IBM’s Bromont Canada plant, the “3×10″ program aims to combat workplace boredom by changing employees full set of responsibilities 3 times every 10 years. The program is managed by someone who has worked in 10 different jobs within the plant over the last 28 years. Expect within a few years the likelihood that a 3×10 program will have shifted to a 2×1 program….
• American-Idolatry : People love competition, they love winners, and they relish the battle! Everyone is learning that if they are to succeed in the future, they have to appeal to the new base of hero-worship that comes from our new awards driven society. Everywhere I go, I see companies who are far more willing to celebrate and elevate heroes. DHL holds an annual innovation day which includes an award ceremony with partners who have worked with them on innovative ideas. Deloitte South Africa hosts an annual “Best Company To Work For’ survey and combines into it an elaborate awards ceremony. The future of workplace and partner renumeration is all about the red-carpet, the spotlight, and the celebration of success!
• the big impact of small incrementalism. Everyone is learning that one way to win the future is by having a lot of small wins that add up to big gains. The oil industry currently retrieves only 1 out of 3 barrels per well on average, yet a 1% improvement represents huge revenue gains! 7% of power on transmission and distribution lines are lost as heat, yet reduce that loss by 10% – and that would equal all the new wind power installed in the US in 2006. Todays’ typical automotive system uses only 25% of the energy in the tank — the balance is lost to waste, heat, inefficiency. Work on increasing that on a year over year basis, and there are some pretty solid gains through innovation. .At DuPont, the savings add up: globally, they now produce 40% more material as a global company using the same amount of energy they used in 1990. Up to 30% of the energy used in a typical industrial or commercial building today is wasted, but new, incremental improvements in green building design and other eco-principles are fixing this fast. Every industry I am dealing with sees small marginal wins adding up to huge tactical advantage! Small is the new winner…
• communities redefined: there were 37 million senior citizens in the US in 2006, or about 12% of the population. By 2030, there will be 71.5 million of them, representing 20% of the population. Other nations in the Western world are seeing the same trend: we’re all about to become like Japan! And the reality of funding issues means it will be impossible to have the same seniors-housing or assisted living type of infrastructure that we’ve had in the past. The next generation of retirees are going to live at home longer; they’ll live with each other more; the hippies of the 60′s are going to find themselves in the seniors communes of 2015! Community-bliss: far out, man! What does it mean? Communities are going to have to be rethought, re-designed and reconstructed – community ergonomics is going to be a massive growth industry! Overall, we’ll see a lot more growth in high density, compact, mixed-use communities – and a lot of innovative thinking as to just what the concept of ‘community’ means.

These are but a few trends that I’m thinking about. I’ve got HUNDREDS more.

Think about these trends from this perspective: there is a lot of transformative change that is underway.

This is no time to think “small.” This is the time in which you need to be thinking “big.” How “small” is your world: do you have a narrow view of opportunity? The reality is that right now, thinking BIG in terms of opportunity and the future will be crucial to your future success.

What does that does it mean for your future? In the old days, companies had “industries” that they worked within, “markets” that they sold into, and “business models” that they pursued. Assumptions that drove their decisions.

Every single assumption that you might have about your future could be wrong. Challenge those assumptions, think about the rapidity of future trends, innovate — and you’ll find the growth opportunities that seem to elude so many others.

I was in Billings, Montana last week, speaking at the annual meeting of a financial group.  The audience included a large cross section of business executives from throughout the Midwest. My talk centred around the trends that might provide for sustainable economic growth. Here’s what I focused on:

• a significant and lasting change in perspective. I spend a lot of time with major international organizations, either in strategic leadership meetings or at various association events or conferences. I often run a text message poll at the start of such sessions to gauge the audience perspective of the current rate of economic growth. As I noted in this post, I’ve seen quite a change in attitude and perspective in the last few months.
• significant growth is emerging from “solving the big problems.” I am a big believer that the efforts to solve the big challenges with respect to energy, the environment and health care will provide the momentum to kickstart the economy once again. I spend a lot of time examining signs of innovation and growth; and there is a tremendous amount of mind share being devoted to each of these areas.
• fundamental and long lasting growth trends in global markets. Before the economy went sour in 2008, McKinsey was extremely bullish on the prospects for economic growth driven by the rapid industrialization of emerging economies, noting that “almost a billion new consumers will enter the global marketplace in the next decade …. with an income level that allows spending on discretionary goods,” and that “the ranks of the middle class will swell by 1.8 billion to become 52% of total population, up from 30% today.” I think on a long term basis, those trends are still valid and will provide for tremendous economic growth.
• a rapid response of organizations to the fast emergence of new markets and opportunities. I am seeing a significant number of organizations focused at the top on “revenue innovation” — that is, generating revenue by entering new markets or through new products and solutions. One CEO of a major global organization put it to me this way: “traditional markets are declining … we’re going other places that have better growth opportunities.” This is the concept of chameleon revenue, which you should read about here.
• signs of various industries reinventing themselves. China and India and Brazil are cleaning our clocks when it comes to manufacturing, with sheer brainpower and design capabilities; the period from 1990 to 2010 saw the decline of the North American manufacturing industry with the resultant massive economic shock. But what I’m seeing out there tells me that North American companies will learn to compete again by challenging old assumptions, and by challenging themselves to do things differently this time around; for example, with mass customization, and through the reinvention of traditional manufacturing processes.
• the emergence of intelligent infrastructure. Quite simply, every device around us is going to gain intelligence in the next decade. We’ll have awareness of their status, location, and address; this leads to the birth of countless new products, companies and industries. There is real transformative industry growth will come when everything plugs into the cloud, and as location intelligence becomes a significant transformative trend.
• the impact of the next generation. While many people bemoan the ‘work ethic’ of Gen-Y, I think they are likely the most entrepreneurial generation ever. They collaborate, think, and generate ideas in exciting and different ways, and I think that provides them with a motivation to “do their own thing” unlike any other generation in history. And that is a significant driver for economic growth. During the recession of 2001, 569,750 new companies were created in North America – mostly small businesses. And companies with less than 20 employees accounted for 100% of the new job growth from 1990 to 2000. Global experience shows similar trends. That’s the context of what this ‘next generation’ will do.

As a futurist, I’m optimistic and bullish on the future. (I have to be; I can’t quite go on stage and say to people — “guess what — your future sucks!”)

I don’t think there is any wishful thinking behind this sentiment ; it comes from the discussions and observations I get from going out and speaking to tens of thousands of people at various conferences and events through the last several months.

Here’s an interesting clip about the emerging era of “personal energy infrastructure management.” It was filmed at my ski club back in January.

We put the clip together for the folks at CNBC Fast Money; they called expressing interest in the possibility of having a series of future trends vignettes that could be used to spark some discussion on the show. Hence, the reference in the clip as to “what does the Fast Money panel think?”

There’s been no progress yet on a go-ahead, but I thought it was a great clip anyways!

The clip was produced by David Mitchell, who is a long time snowbaord/skiing video professional; he’s currently the producer of the Disney XD show, Shreducation.

Another report on my keynote for 4,000 at the annual meeting of the National Parks & Recreation Association, putting into a concise summary the key trends that I covered (from the Parks & Rec monthly magazine).

“… a solid turn-out of nearly 6,000 park professionals and advocates made the 45th edition of Congress a resounding success. …. The theme, “Looking to the Future,” permeated nearly every facet of the event held at the Salt Center Convention Center.

In keeping with the Congress theme, Looking to the Future, opening session keynote speaker Jim Carroll did not disappoint. The Canada-based futurist built his address around key themes and issues likely to confront the field of parks and recreation in the next 10 to 15 years.

Carroll encouraged the packed convention hall to think in terms of transformation.

Other trends Carroll advised attendees to be aware of included:

• healthcare (we’ll be treated for the conditions we’re likely to have before they set in)
• hyper connectivity (mapping, body sensors, and sports equipment)
• Next-Gen re-engagement
• fragmentation (the result of a faster, more connected world that will shape sports, recreation, and hobbies)
• re-defined communities (society’s big problems will be solved locally)
• water/energy/environmental conservation issues
• demographics (think baseball diamonds that evolve into cricket pitches)
• workforce trends (Gen Y has a radically different set of job expectations than its predecessors)
• gaps in expectations (expect a disconnect between what the public wants and what it can afford)

If someone today were to ask me what the most challenging trend will be for first-world nations to deal with — it would have to the last issue.

I’ve got a lot to write and say about the “expectation gap” issue, and have been covering this in dozens of speeches over the last while.

The “expectation gap” is a trend that will define both the opportunity for innovation, as well as distinct perils for standards of living should it not be carefully managed. And to a huge degree, it relates to the political and social maturity that a country can display as it tries to deal with and manage the gap.

More to come!

My January / February CA Magazine article is out; entitled “Stranger than Science Fiction,” it examines a major theme that has been part of many of my keynotes throughout 2009: what happens to your industry when the pace of innovation is no longer set within the industry itself, but rather, is set by the blistering rate of change as set by Silicon Valley?

Stranger than Science Fiction

by Jim Carroll, CAMagazine, January 2010

Is your industry in the midst of a transition at Silicon Valley speed? If it isn’t, it could be very soon, because I’m seeing it happen wherever I go. Take the global credit card industry. For a long time, the pace of innovation has been relatively slow and deliberate; aside from the chip found in your new credit card, it’s still been about the same old piece of plastic.

All that is about to change, because as I observed at a recent global financial conference, it is quite likely that our cellphones, BlackBerrys and iPhones will become the credit card of the not-too distant future. When you enter a store, you’ll punch a code into your iPhone to confirm the transaction, and you’ll get an instant receipt. As this transition occurs, the financial payment industry will find it has suddenly lost control of its innovation agenda. Rather than having the future figured out in boardrooms of bank towers, control will have been wrested away by someone in Silicon Valley who innovates at hyper-speed.

The trend is happening everywhere I look, even in the world of sports. I spoke to 4,000 professionals at the National Recreation and Parks Association’s annual conference in Salt Lake City. I challenged the audience – most of them responsible for civic or state recreational activities and park infrastructure – to think about the baseball bat of 2015 or 2020. From my vantage point, it’s going to look the same, but it’s likely to have a variety of sensors built into it that will provide players with instant feedback regarding the strength and accuracy of their swing; the same sensors will trigger their nearby cellphone to automatically capture a video of their time at the plate.

Retail will change at the same fast and furious pace. I’ll walk into a store, and behind the scenes, the store will recognize me through an interaction with my mobile device. That will cause a plasma TV in the corner to start displaying a customized advertisement for me based on prior shopping history, at the same time I’m zapped a coupon for a 20% discount for a few items over on aisle 12.

Farfetched? I don’t think so. Creepy? To us maybe, but perhaps not to the next generation. When we think of the strangeness of the future and our likely negative reaction to some of what might come next, we have to remember this: it’s not bad, it’s just different.

The key point is that entire industries will be swept along at a raging rate of innovation. All of a sudden, those people who have managed in-store design, layout and promotions will find their old skills don’t transfer as easily to this strange new world as the digital denizens reshape the customer experience.

Even the slow, staid senior citizen housing industry is being impacted. Five to 10 years out, we’ll have a lot of baby boomers living out their golden years in regular homes as opposed to retirement homes (simply because society won’t be able to afford it). Medical professionals will manage their care from afar using a vast array of bio-0connectivity medical devices; sensors embedded throughout the home will detect if their behaviour patterns are out of the norm and will trigger an alert. Science fiction? Research into this type of sensor-application is well underway at the University of Missouri.

Here’s a good way to think about innovating at Silicon Valley speed: in my home office, I have an MP3 player from somewhere around 1999. It can hold about three or four songs. It seemed cool at the time. Today, it’s positively a joke compared with the modern iPod.

Could the fundamentals of your industry as quickly become something like a joke?

———

Think about this article, and then ask yourself:

• what are the big transformations that are going to occur in my industry as Silicon Valley Velocity takes over?
• where will there be business disruption as result?
• how can I be a disruptor, and establish opportunity?
• how will my target customers change – how can I reach new customers — how can I build new customer revenue that hasn’t existed before?

Think of many more questions like that, and you’ve found countless opportunities for innovation.

More information:

• Video: Pervasive connectivity
• Video: Location intelligence and the future of recreation
• Video The future of seniors care ” “BIG challenges, transformations, opportunities!
• Blog entry Reinventing the future with transformative technology</b>

We live in transformative times. The sad fact is, many are unaware of that fact, and as a result, are missing out for opportunities for innovation.

Bill Gates once observed that “most people overestimate the amount of change that will occur in two years and underestimate the change that will occur over ten years.”

Certainly that’s true today. All around us, there’s a tremendous amount of creative thinking occurring as people work to solve some of the biggest challenges of our times. Ten years from now, we’ll sit back in awe at some of the fascinating ideas that came to fruition.

Much of this transformation is coming about as we enter the next phase in our often unique relationship with technology –what we might call pervasive connectivity. Quite simply, everything around us is starting to “plug in” –and there are tremendous opportunities for change as this happens. To ensure that we capture these opportunities, business and government must ensure that they’ve got a good, solid technology infrastructure that can carry them into this odd new world.

Consider the issue of energy and the environment, and the revolution that is now underway in terms of intelligent building infrastructure. In the not too distant future, most residential and commercial properties will have an HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) infrastructure that has ‘gone smart.’ Right now, major industrial players are adding intelligence to the next generation of HVAC systems. We’re seeing remote monitoring and management through Internet-linked thermostats; better analysis and insight into energy usage through remote management of energy production assets ; rapid response to out-of-norm operations. In the not too distant future –maybe by the time you read this article –you’ll use a mobile application that will utilize its GPS connection to determine when you are getting close to home –and it will turn your furnace on.

Technologies such as these allow people to more actively control overall energy usage, and reduce the environmental impact of that use. There are broad benefits to society from encouraging the more rapid adoption of such technologies.

Then there’s the revolution in thinking that is occurring in the world of long-term seniors care. Clearly, the future challenges we face are pretty stark: a massive ramp-up in demand with a shortfall in available and planned units; a funding crisis brought about by plunging investment / housing values, and a bigger tax deficit as a result of the economic challenges of today; not to forget ongoing skills and staffing issues as the very same baby boomers exit the economy in staggering numbers.

So what’s going to happen? We’re starting to see some big, transformative thinking that involves a lot more community and family care. With this, we’ll witness the emergence of the concept of the “virtual retirement home.” By 2020, most seniors will live in their own homes, and their health conditions will be actively monitored by medical professionals through a network of intelligent bio-connectivity and other devices. We won’t have a lot of senior citizen homes — we’ll have virtual seniors networks.

Research is already well underway into the concept; at the University of Missouri, they’re actively working with technology that allows for the use of sensors and other technologies to monitor seniors living at home. Behavioral changes involving sleeping patterns, a reduction in physical activity or other changes can trigger contact; and remote medical devices will allow for routine blood pressure and other medical test.

Then there’s the transformation that is occurring throughout many industries as they learn to rethink the basic business models by which they operate. Think of efforts towards ‘Car 2.0′, which involves a fundamental reinvention of current transportation mindsets. There is a strong belief that we will see a reinvention of the auto industry as the restructuring occurs; particularly as Silicon Valley begins to laser-aim its focus at the next generation of business model. Contrast the thinking of Ford versus Honda. The former retools their plant annually, building several hundred thousand models of a particular vehicle, hoping it will sell. The latter can change things up on a dime, shifting production to meet changing consumer demand in as little as ten days. It’s that type of fundamental transformation that will help to encourage the economic recovery, because business organizations will be operating with far more agility and flexibility.

There are thousands of similar, low-key trends that put together, will have a huge impact on our future.

And here’s a key point: all of these trends involve connectivity and technology; intelligent infrastructure and the intelligent deployment of computing horsepower. We are already in the midst of the next phase of our march to the world of pervasive connectivity. Society is only to become more reliant upon sophisticated, reliable computer infrastructure. We won’t be able to get by with some of the creaky, tired, slow-to-scale systems that many of us have in place.

Here’s the conundrum: one impact of the slowing economy is that leaders have stopped “thinking big” when it comes to the transformative opportunities for innovation through technology. And yet, it is clear that the world of transformative thinking and the solution to our big problems is increasingly occurring at the pace of Silicon Valley.

That means, to keep up with innovation, you have to keep up with that pace of change.

Over the next several weeks, I will be speaking at a series of events sponsored by Microsoft related to their Windows 7 launch. The audience includes key executives (CIO’s, CFO’s, CTO’s and IT managers) from a wide variety of industries.

While much of the news coverage of Microsoft focuses around the “consumer” side of the Windows 7 launch, of equal significance is the release of several new server infrastructure upgrades that permit large and small business to take their business into the next level of operational innovation.

In Toronto the other day, Steve Ballmer was speaking to this aspect of innovation. I find that some media gave the message short shift, because their planned story spin didn’t fit his message.

That’s too bad, because the reality is that having an infrastructure that provides for a lot of business flexibility is going to be critical as we transition into the “next economy.” Clearly, there’s a lot of business turmoil out there, and organizations need to be able to change quickly to deal with new circumstances.

Given that, part of my message at these events will focus on what I’ve come to call the “new rules for the next economy.” What are those rules?

• structure for growth: In many industries, the painful process of contraction is either over, or coming to an end. Once you’ve done the cost cutting, you only grow the profit line through new revenue. New revenue means new products and services; that comes from insight, collaboration, and thinking. Smart companies are ensuring they have a razor-sharp growth oriented culture, and technology enablers that help them get there.
• focus on “chameleon revenue”: in many industries, the revenue stream five years from now won’t come from the products or services offered today. You have to keep a product/service innovation pipeline full in order to generate these new revenue sources — and do it faster and better than before. Crayola has two supply chains: one for existing revenue, and one for innovation-based revenue. Interesting concept!
• speed up: I spoke at a global travel conference a few weeks ago, and noted that 1/3 of all leisure travel is now last-minute; the average time frame for planning now down to just 15 days; 36% of last minute vacations are 3-4 nights; and 30% are 1-2 nights. Smart travel companies have in place an infrastructure that allows them to rapidly change their product lineup, marketing message, brand image, and the flexibility to communicate a new message to a massive client base quickly.
• ingest new technology faster. There’s going to be a huge amount of business model change as the tsunami of technology continues unabated. Anyone in retail will be hammered by the rapid transition to cellphone based payment technology. Winners will be able to transition at the speed of Silicon Valley — with the result that leaders are those who will continue to find operational innovation in ways they hadn’t thought of before
• shake up methodology: think Manufacturing 2.0, and a blog post I wrote here some time ago. The future is all about Honda’s thinking: “how quickly can I change” is the defining question in terms of market flexibility. Manufacturing models are undergoing a huge shakeup, and those who transition them for maximum agility and flexibility will dominate the next marketplace.
• be offensively defensive: no matter what industry you are in, there is someone out there who wants to mess up your business model. Before that happens, you should mess it up yourself, so that you better control the end game. Technology has and will play a huge role in business model transformation, and your infrastructure has to be up to the task.

Bottom line: business will continue to get faster, more complicated, and far more challenging.

Will you be able to ahead with a creaky, finger-in-the-dyke infrastructure?

There’s no doubt that one of the biggest issues facing the planet and its inhabitants in the coming decades is how we treat the dual challenges of energy and the environment. For years, I’ve been advising my clients about one of the biggest trends related to these two issues: the rapid emergence of an intelligent energy infrastructure. It’s happening now – all around you – and the implications are pretty huge in terms of economic growth. The big question is, what role can accountants play as this infrastructure builds?

From a high level, the trend unfolding is that we will be able to more directly and individually control how we use energy resources, giving each of us ways to reduce our own environmental footprint.

We’re seeing small steps already today: for example, I just bought the new IP Thermostat app for my iPhone; it provides instant access to the two Internet-enabled Proliphix thermostats in my home and ski chalet/cottage. (I could link to my thermostats before via a web page, but IP Thermostat makes it seamless and fast.) The technology allows me to actively manage my energy consumption and better manage my environmental footprint. A world in which hundreds of millions of people are doing the same thing would put a serious dent into heating and air-conditioning usage.

Such devices are just a small example of a number of major trends that will lead to more of this type of connectivity becoming mainstream. For example, major industrial players are adding intelligence to the next generation of commercial, industrial and residential heating, ventilation and air-conditioning equipment, to allow for remote monitoring, management and rapid response to out-of-norm operations.

The advent of the “smart grid” – an electrical system that operates on a more efficient, cost-effective basis through the use of information technology – is another example. It’s not all hype; Cisco recently suggested that the connectivity component of energy infrastructure will be worth more than US$100 billion over five years. That’s some serious spending.

And if we consider the new role of analytics, in that such connectivity will allow consumers and users to better understand their usage, and allow more intelligent demand.

The Positive Energy initiative, for example, encourages hydro utilities to send out electrical bills that compare your usage to that of your neighbours. If you’re efficient, you get some smiley faces on your bill. If not, you get some images that would encourage you to do better. It’s a unique, simple idea, and yet it provides a glimpse into where we can go in the future if we allow people to take a more analytical, deeper view of how they use energy, and hence, impact the environment.

Imagine that as we build this intelligent, connected energy system we can provide tools allowing consumers to further manage their household energy use. For example, software tools could allow them to query an energy provider for details on how well their fridge was operating compared to neighbourhood norms, how much they could save by purchasing a more efficient microwave, or how much money they are losing by postponing that oil change on their 10-year-old hyper-connected car.

We know that everything around us is beginning to plug into the cloud.

There might be unique opportunities to consider how we can maximize the potential for insight as this occurs.

For years, I’ve been advising my clients that one of the biggest trends for the next decade is the rapid emergence of an intelligent energy infrastructure.

It’s happening now — it’s happening all around you — and the implications are pretty huge in terms of economic growth.

Here’s a video that was filmed two years ago, in which I talk about what happens “when thermostats join the cloud.”

Such connectivity allows me to actively manage my energy spend, and better manage my own little environmental footprint. Take us into a world in which hundreds of millions are doing the same thing, and you put a serious dent into heating and air conditioning spending.

Device connectivity is but one small trend in a number of major trends that are coming together all at once:

• HVAC 2.0: major industrial players are adding intelligence to the next generation of commercial, industrial and resident heating, ventilation and air conditioning equipment. We’re seeing remote monitoring and management; better analysis and insight into ; rapid response to out-of-norm operations. All of this allows people to more actively control overall energy usage
• increasing energy / electrical system demand: quite simply, despite the recession, the demand on our electrical grid continues to increase. This demands new solutions, with the result that a lot of people are putting a lot of mindshare to the issue of how to squeeze more out of our existing energy infrastructure.
• the new NIMBYism: one impact of social networking is that it is far more difficult for any utility to build a new power plant. The new activism can slow and delay such efforts, and often, successfully shut them down. This only makes the challenge of doing more with what we have now ever more important.
• Energy grid 2.0: do a search for “smart grid” and you’ll see a flood of news stories. There’s a tremendous amount of hype, but much of it is real. Cisco recently suggested that the connectivity component of the infrastructure will be worth more than $100 billion over five years. That’s some serious spending.
• the impact of analytics: raw computing horsepower will help to build the smart grid — companies like Google are aggressively involved. The same horsepower will help consumers and users better understand their usage, and allow more intelligent demand. Big, big trend!

So what does it all mean?

As thermostats plug into the cloud, everything changes.

More information:

• iPThermostat app from Our Home Spaces
• Blog post When thermostats get connected
• Blog post Silicon Valley: Is Innovation Dead?
• Blog post HVAC 2.0
• Trends document (big PDF); page 3 Analytics & the energy grid
• Proliphix Internet enabled thermostats

I spent some time with the CEO and senior management team of a large global energy company.

They engaged me to provide them with insight on the trends which will impact the global oil, natural gas, energy and distribution sectors in the years to come.

It was a small, intimate get-together with about 40 senior executives; I provided my insight into the trends that I believe will have the most impact. That was followed by about an hour of very intense, deep probing discussion; I obviously stirred up some creative thinking within the group.

While not going into the specifics, the broad brush strokes of what I covered off included my observations that they should be thinking about these issues.

• presume massive market disruption: Think GoogleCar: don’t limit your view of the future as to what might transpire. The future of any industry will likely bear no resemblance to the industry structure of today. Future competitors will probably come from completely outside of an existing industry. Challenge every assumption that you have about the future.
• prepare for significant transformation: realize that existing insurmountable challenges are simply a big opportunity to someone else. Someone, somewhere, is going to figure out how to plug hundreds of thousands if not millions of small, local, home based renewable energy sources into the energy grid. It’s mostly a computation/mathematical issue: the energy grid was not designed for two way electricity transmission, and so there will have to be an intense amount of computational dynamics to structure a solution. Result? An organization that is a master of massive computational capabilities — and hence, grid management — might very well be the new energy company of the future.
• find opportunity in scientific rapidity: we’re in the era of global collaborative knowledge generation, and R&D is rapidly externalizing. The infinite global idea loop means that scientific discovery is now happening faster than ever before, which provides for more product and market opportunity. Innovative organizations plug in, ensuring that all staff are in tune with the rapid rate of scientific advance that surrounds them, and are prepared to ride new emerging ideas as soon as they begin to emerge.
• capitalize on skills fragmentation: the war for talent will define future success. We’re entering a time of massive skills specialization and ever smaller knowledge niches. As I covered off in my keynote to a global financial audience in the Cayman’s, it’s the organizations that can build a culture, structure and flexibility to attract and retain skills that will find the key to success in the high velocity economy.
• structure for volatility: extreme volatility is the ‘new normal.’ If you have the capability to quickly adjust strategy, structure, plans, skills, projects and teams, you’ve got the right stuff for the new world of constant change.
• prepare for business intensity: innovative organizations plan for more rapid entrance and exits from new markets. They do so through flexible structure. Partnership takes on new role in era of exponentiating, fast complexity and the rapid emergence of new opportunities: if you can scale up, you can win big.

The Economist Intelligence Unit recently noted that “the ability to swiftly adapt to change represents the greatest challenge manufacturers face in creating long-term value.”

That’s the bottom line for innovating in the high velocity energy industry.

Related posts:

• The Google Car and massive market disruption
• Global infinite idea loop
• Talent, not money, is the new corporate battlefront

I wrote this PDF report last spring, before the recession set in. Yet I still think it makes for a lot of powerful arguments as to where we will see industrial and market growth in the future.

From the introduction: Gloom has set in on global markets. Volatility rages. Some organizations have gone into a mode of “aggressive indecision,” deferring action while they try to figure out “what comes next.” A pretty lousy strategy that is doomed to fail in the longer term.

Future oriented leaders understand the reality of growth. They know that we live in a time in which opportunities for growth abound. They’ve aligned the mission of the organization so that they are capitalizing on real opportunity, not short term economic challenges.

Growth is everywhere

It’s easy during a time of economic volatility to lose sight of where the global economy is really headed. Yet while stock markets might rock, innovation thrives.

New ideas continue to be explored, markets grow, and industries emerge. A variety of trends indicate that opportunities for growth continue to surround us.

• Global food production must double in the next twenty years to match
  population growth. There’s nothing but upside in agriculture!
• New industries and markets continue to emerge as advancements in the
  science behind energy, infrastructure, connectivity and health care drive fascinating new areas of growth.
• Many simple and obvious trends drive growth. Generational growth drives the rapid emergence of new markets: by 2020, 17% of the global population will be 65 years or older. Someone will sell a lot of phones with really big buttons!

Think growth. Think opportunity. Innovate for future, don’t stagnate with the past.

More information:

• Read Where’s the growth : global innovation opportunities for the long term
• Read Infrastructure is the new plastic
• Read 7 Things to Do Right Now as the Upturn Begins

I’m at the airport in Austin, Texas, having just delivered the opening keynote for Facilities ’09: National Association of Children’s Hospitals Design conference.

The room was full of CEO’s, board members, architects, and managers responsible for transitioning the physical infrastructure of these facilities into the modern hospital infrastructure of the 21st century.

I’ve just discovered that someone from NACHRI is live-blogging the event, and they covered my talk. I’ll have more to write about this later, but there’s a quick summary of the challenges I raised to the crowd here.

Jim Carroll’s keynote at NACHRI: So the question becomes: what mindset should we have going forward, and what are we doing for the future?

• We need a relentless focus on market growth. There is an unprecedented opportunity for growth through increased efficiencies, cost savings and greening of facilities.

• The scope of the problem will drive a lot of innovative thinking, because only innovating thinking can keep pace, or get ahead of, change.
• We are reinventing the concept of a hospital. Whe hospital will increasingly become virtual as it extends its reach into everyday life. “The hospital as we know it is coming to an end.”
• Build up your experiential capital as well as your financial capital. If the world is changing so fast, experience is invaluable in navigating the complicated and ever changing landscape. Be afirmed to try new things.
• One of the increasing changes is digital technology moving off the plug and into everyday, everywhere life

“We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the changes that will occur in the next ten years. Don’t let yourself be dulled into inaction.” — Bill Gates

You can access the full live blog below.

You can also read where I think we’ll be with health care in the future. The key for organizations struggling to get through this economic mess right now is to focus on the huge variety of future trends that will impact you, understand them, and innovate from them!

Think growth!

More information

• It’s January 15, 2020: Do you know where your health care system is?
• Facilities ’09: Rethinking the hospital
• Live blog updates from Facilities’09:

From my May CAMagazine column.

As we worry and wonder about the state of the global economy, we should remind ourselves that one thing is certain. At some point in the future,newspapers will run banner headlines featuring the words “Economic Recovery.”

The challenge with this particular downturn is that every single event — downsizing, layoff, missed earnings target or corporate bankruptcy — is now repeatedly examined in depth on 24-hour news channels. As a result, it’s easy to lose sight of the following key trends, which will help lead us into economic recovery.

Infrastructure: There is no doubt there will be a significant national economic stimulus due to infrastructure spending, but I believe we’re entering the era of smart infrastructure, which will involve more than shovels and buckets. For example, roadworks projects will use smart-highway technology, such as the linkage of spatial databases (think Google Maps) to GPS technology embedded in cars. It won’t be long before you can put your car on autopilot, so to speak, carefully keeping up with traffic flow as measured by highway-embedded sensors. Science fiction? I don’t think so. Put it this way: every bit of new infrastructure will be integrated with the Internet, and that will provide for some fascinating opportunities.

Healthcare: The ramp-up in healthcare spending that will occur as boomers age will be staggering, and this will perversely drive job growth at the same time it strains the budget. In the US, healthcare spending could equal 60% of gross domestic product in some states within 10 years. Such stark realities are driving furious rates of business model, technological, structural and other innovations in healthcare, much of which will involve sophisticated Internet technologies. For years, I’ve been talking about the potential for bio-connectivity devices: smart home-based medical monitoring technologies doctors can use, via the Internet, to monitor noncritical-care patients. Such innovations will drive a variety of growth-oriented markets.

Environment: Despite the slowdown, there is no pullback in major efforts to deal with challenging issues, which means ecological spending will continue to drive growth markets. McDonald’s is investing in a new company-wide intelligent energy infrastructure management system to deal with annual energy costs of US$1 billion. It expects to reduce overall costs by 20% by having the ability to remotely manage and monitor fryers, air conditioning, water usage and other devices throughout thousands of its restaurants. This will involve using the Internet as a backbone to a sophisticated global energy management system.

Industry reinvention: Similarly, connectivity will play a key role in the reinvention of products and industries. There is a lot of talk about the concept of Car 2.0, which involves a fundamental reinvention of current transportation mind-sets. There is a strong belief that we will see a reinvention of the auto industry, particularly as Silicon Valley begins to laser-aim its focus at the next generation of automotive business model. The next-generation automobile, if it emerges from the land of high-tech, will have “connectivity” as its middle name.

The change agenda of Generation Y: As I described in last month’s column (“They’ll spice up your systems,” p. 14),the members of this technologically aggressive, entrepreneurial generation will completely reshape the fundamentals of every industry, driving economic growth.

All in all, my view is that beyond a three- to six-month horizon, we will start to realize areas of economic growth, and the Internet will continue to play a key role.

I just came off stage in Las Vegas from an opening keynote for a group of about 500 representatives for Trane / Ingersoll Rand, and their key contractor partners. My keynote was to focus on “7 Things They Should Do Right Now to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast.”

Certainly it can be tough in the construction industry right now, and particularly so for contractors. They’re witnessing a laundry list of challenges, including:

• Project deferment, postponement and cancellation
• Prevalence of below-cost bidding
• Financing is vanishing
• New demands for cost-cutting and project management
• A capital spending freeze at many organizations
• A looming funding crisis (e.g. university endowment collapse means less college and university construction in the future)

Of course, that’s what most people might see if they look at the sector. I look further than the 3 minutes, 3 months or 3 years — that’s what a futurist does. And I see a TREMENDOUS amount of momentum.

First off, there’s a lot of fiscal momentum, with the stimulus spending including some:

• $6.4 billion for water projects
• $50 billion for energy programs (efficiency & renewable energy)
• $11 billion on a “smart electrical grid”
• $4.5 billion on federal building energy efficiency
• $47 billion in state fiscal relief, with permission to use funds for school modernization/repair

All of this will have a direct impact on growth in the industry.

Beyond that though, the future looks tremedously bright for the HVAC industry because of what we might call HVAC 2.0. In a nutshell, the industry is going to play a huge role as we work to fix the big societal problems of energy and the environment.

And that is going to happen with the rapid emergence of highly intelligent building infrastructure; ten years out, most buildings will be smart buildings; the Internet and IP will be the backbone to a system that provides for intelligent energy management, monitoring and usage. Silicon Valley and HVAC are getting married, and the result is going to be remarkable.

The National Institute of Building Sciences comments on the impact of this trend, noting that “…an economic expansion based on emerging green markets would create an estimated 3 million jobs … and help establish communities with high-performance buildings that are both economically advantageous and environmentally conscious.”

The trend is driven by two things that have undeniable monentum: the need for energy savings, and the green building movement. Consider the health care sector. Green specs in health care / hospital building projects has gone from 13.3 percent in 2006, to 37.6 percent in 2007, to an even higher percentage in 2008. There’s a bit of pullback in 2009 as projects are deferred, but the increase will continue to come at us with a vengeance.

So as a contractor, how do you innovate? By keeping on top of fast pace trends in your industry in terms of methodology, ideas, technology, new design thinking — high velocity change!!!!

So what I suggested to them was that, for example, they could get out in front of tenant / building manager needs, with this line of thinking:

• when times get tough, quality, service and relationships rule
• success is found not by competing on price, but through partnership: ie. ‘we’ve got the latest strategies to help achieve cost savings’ (i.e. remote energy management)
• key attitude? “we’re on top of fast paced developments with building management, so you don’t need to!”

I do a tremendous amount of research when I go in to keynote a group. That’s why I’ve got such a solid, blue chip, global client list. Real innovation takes real thinking, with an alignment of existing and forthcoming trends to innovation opportunities.

In the interview just posted on my site (“What is a futurist“), I commented that “we live in transformative times — we’ll look back at 2009-2010 as the period of time in which we started to apply really transformative thinking to solving some of the big problems we have in health care, energy and the environment.”

I find that a lot of people don’t think about the major changes that are going to occur over the long term. Bill Gates caught this reality when he observed that “we always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.”

I followed this line of thinking when I was the opening keynote speaker for the Alberta Senior Citizens Housing Association two weeks ago. The challenges faced by the industry are pretty stark:

• a massive ramp-up in demand with a shortfall in available and planned units
• a funding crisis brought about by plunging investment / housing values, and a bigger tax deficit as a result of the economy
• ongoing skills and staffing issues
• increasing scrutiny in the public eye
• heightened expectations on quality of service from the boomer generation

Perhaps the biggest issue of all is that every baby boomer would hope that during their sunset years, they’d be able to live out their time in a wonderful retirement home.

That’s simply not going to be the case — the simple demographics of North American society indicate that society and retirement savings won’t be able to pay for this reality. Get into other areas of the world, including Asia, and the crisis in seniors housing is going to be even bigger, particularly that some countries aren’t even yet to the unit-level that we have in North America.

So what’s going to happen? We’re going to see big, transformative thinking. Rather than placing seniors in retirement homes, why not extend the retirement home concept into their own home. Community and family care is going to play a huge role here,

Technology will also play a big role in this transformative change, as it will move us to the concept of the “virtual retirement home.” By 2020, most seniors will live in their own homes, and their health conditions will be actively monitored through a network of intelligent bio-connectivity and other devices. We won’t have a lot of senior citizen homes — we’ll have virtual seniors networks.

In my keynote, I spoke about research that is underway now into this concept. (US Fed News, February 2009 Health-monitoring technology helps seniors live at home longer, University of Missouri Researchers find“). Two key points:

• “Researchers at the University of Missouri are using sensors, computers and communication systems …. to monitor the health of older adults who are living at home.”
  “
• ….motion sensor networks installed in seniors homes can detect changes in behavior and physical activity, including walking and sleeping patterns…early identification of changes can prompt health care intervention….”

This type of research is real, and when we look back from 2019 or 2020, we’ll realize that this was the type of transformative thinking that would help to bring about a solution to a pretty big problem. And it’s important to realize that there’s a lot of activity going on in this particular field. Notes one key researcher from Intel, speaking about the research they are doing in this area:

“We have the potential to aim our innovation engine at the age wave challenge and change the way we do health care from a crisis- driven, assembly-line, hospital approach to a personal-driven approach, with people taking care of themselves with help from family, friends and technologies.”

When I look around me at the deep problems our world faces, I see a lot of innovative and transformative thinking, with big ideas as to how to solve those complex problems.

Transformative thinking — it’s all around you — you need to start watching.

I’ve been confirmed as the opening keynote speaker for “Facilities 09“, a conference organized by the National Association of Children’s Hospitals and Related Institutions, to be held in Austin, Texas in mid-May.

They’re running with my “Moving Beyond the Meltdown: Aligning for Growth Through Innovation” topic. It’s another group who finds that in order to move the their association forward, they need to move them beyond their current mindset. They’re using the keynote description:

“In the face of widespread economic volatility, organizations have three choices: they can panic, making rash decisions on structure, markets, investments; they can freeze and do nothing; or they can respond to rapid change through innovation, particularly with respect to strategies, structure, capabilities, markets, products, and activities. Jim Carroll, one of the world’s leading futurists, trends and innovation experts with clients such as Lincoln Financial, Caterpillar, the Walt Disney Organization and Nestle, will share his insight on the strategies that leading edge organizations are pursuing to stay ahead of the economy.”

Look, here’s the thing: at some point, whether it’s one year, five years, or even ten years, we’ll be back into a growth economy. People will be busy rethinking business models ; they will be aggressively transforming business methodologies to achieve cost savings; they’ll be partnering in new ways with new partners in order to achieve new goals; they’ll be busy implementing a flood of new ideas driven by rapid science.

In terms of the future of health care facility design, there is no shortage of ideas in terms of design momentum: green building concepts, hyperconnected energy management systems, the concept of the virtual hospital with remote patient management, and the need for rapid implementation of new medical treatment capabilities. All of which (and many more) pose the challenge of : how we design in the context of high-velocity change? And how do we get our mindset out of the challenges of the “here-and-now” so that we’re focused not just on managing the current challenges, but are fully prepared to attack with zeal the opportunities of the future?

That’s the mindset and message that I’ll carry into Austin, Texas in two months.

Think growth!

More information

• Facilities ’09 conference web site
• It’s January 15, 2020: What Have We Learned About Healthcare in the Last Decade?
• Future Medicine: Prescriptions for 21st Century Health Care

Last November, I released my “What Comes Next” trends perspective, outlining some of the significant trends that I believed would have the most impact in our longer term future. It’s still worth a read, and I don’t think the economic turmoil has changed anything written there.

So I admit I was surprised, given the massive quantity of doom-and-gloom thinking which is smothering creativity everywhere, when I came across this advertisement, offering a 3-day executive level course on ‘Competing with Analytics.” And right there, they’ve quoted my “What Comes Next” document, which was re-printed in Toronto, Canada’s Globe and Mail earlier in January of this year: “Analytics is hot….it’s where the next-billion dollar industries will be born.”

I don’t disagree with that assessment, and neither does IBM CEO Sam Palmisano.

As quoted widely, and from an article in eWeek, in early November he made a speech in which he “called on the next administration to invest more money in refurbishing the electronic grid system to reduce the amount of energy required to power it, make better use of information technology to reinvent the way healthcare is provided and green technology investments that would enhance traffic and mass transit systems to make everybody who depends on these systems more efficient.”

Which, if you study it, revolves around analytics, linked to infrastructure. Where’s the growth? We all know where it is!

Obviously Sam is a bit self-serving with his call to action, but the truth is IBM is one of many companies that is at the forefront of smart infrastructure development.

There’s lots of growth out there. Innovators stay focused on opportunity, the future, and educating themselves on the trends that are going to have real impact in the future. Ten years back, you’ll look at this advertisement and think — “man, those guys were on to something.”

I think I’ll write the folks running the 3-day course and see if they will give me a complimentary admission. (-;

More information

• “What Comes Next: A Trends Perspective for the Future”
• Competing with Analytics course Web site
• Time for a new digital deal – eWeek

Last week, I spoke in Palo Alto for a a small, intimate dinner of a number of CIO’s for a variety of companies based in Silicon Valley. The focus of the talk was “how to provide for a culture and focus on innovation during a down market?”

I spoke to this issue from a number of perspectives. One issue I touched on was the inevitability of a rebound in the fortune of IT. If we cast our minds out two to five years, or perhaps even sooner, there are certain key trends in which we see a massive amount of innovation:

• pervasive connectivity: we’ve barely scratched the surface of the era in which everyday devices gain connectivity and intelligence. The Internet enabled thermostat in my home is but a harbinger of what is yet to come. With it’s own Web browser, it has become a fascinating tool by which energy usage can be more closely monitored. The same device is deployed throughout the Arby’s chain, and offers a significant new method of controlling energy-spend.

• continued growth of mobile: One recent survey of consumers suggested that while they might be willing to give up buying the latest plasma TV, there was no way they’d give up mobile or the Internet. Mobile is weaving itself into daily life, sophisticated platforms are finally here, devices are fashion, developers are on board in a big way, and the emerging applications are either real and useful, or just a tremendous bit of fun.
• location intelligence: we’re barely scratching the surface with this one. Every device around us is becoming connected (pervasive connectivity), and we’ll gain knowledge as to its status through sensory awareness. Not only that : we’ll know exactly where it is. Search for “location intelligence professionals” online, and you’ll discover a group of people who understand how unique our future is set to be.
• computational analytics: I’ve written about this before, in the context of this being “the next billion dollar industry.” Some of the biggest challenges we face and the solutions that we find for them — in terms of transportation, energy and the environment — will come from applying massive computing power and complex alogorithms to them. Think about smart highway infrastructure as an example: it would be ludicrous to not believe that we will see 5, 10, 15 or 20% incremental increases in energy conservation that will come from ever-more
  automated traffic systems.
• staggering new mass markets: six months ago, it was believed that in the next 10 years, 1 billion people worldwide would move into the middle class. Maybe it’s only half that now : who knows? But 500 million is still a staggering number. There is plenty of potential for connectivity, mobile, hardware and software to newly emerging mass markets.
• bio-connectivity: if I were a betting man, I’d have my money on this trend. Simply put, the global health care system is massively broken. Ten years out, home health care will pre-dominate, supported by a sophisticated infrastructure of smart health care energy devices. Yes, I’ve written about this trend on this blog too; see below.
• transformational thinking: an entire generation has been stuck in an older paradigm of how to network; the election of a younger President, wired to the nation and the world, who thinks, interacts, moves, plans, and acts differently, sets even more velocity to the power of connectivity. The Internet, mobile, social networking and blogs changed an entire presidential race; they’re set to change everything else in society on a continuous basis.

Like everywhere, Silicon Valley is being impacted today by a focus on the downside. This happened in every earlier recession; but at the same time, innovators toiled away, coming up with the next amazing devices, concepts, software, ideas and infrastructure that later boggles the mind. We’ve barely scratched the surface in terms of what comes next.

More information:

• Read about what happens When Thermostats get connected
• Read the article about bio-connectivity, The Doctor is in around the clock
• Read the article Minds of their own
• Read “Bioconnectivity and the rapid emergence of new markets”
• Read the article Command and Control – Opportunity Awaits Companies that Master Hyperconnectivity

It’s been announced that I will be a keynote speaker at the World HealthCare Innovation & Technology Conference, to be held in Washington, DC in December. In particular, I’ll be taking a look at the importance of one of the most significant trends that is just starting to unfold.

Twenty years from now, most people will look back and realize that right about now, we had three huge, transformative trends underway: device connectivity, geo-connectivity, and bio-connectivity

Essentially, everything around is about to become linked in — every device that surrounds your life. My home thermostat is linked to the Internet, and that has changed the scope of how I interact with energy.

Layered on top of device connectivity is spatial intelligence for each device — vis-a-vis Google Maps types of applications. Think about new forms of energy management built upon sophisticated geographic mapping applications.

Add to this the fact that this type of technology will migrate to devices that will help us better manage complex health circumstances.

I’ve been writing and speaking about the idea of bio-connectivity and the concept of “hyper-connectivity” for over a decade (before Nortel lamely built a lame marketing campaign around the latter phrase a year ago.) It remains one of the most significant trends that will yet unfold in the health care sector. Our concept of health care delivery will be forever transformed.

Simply put, link the scope of the looming health care crisis to the momentum that will come from Silicon Valley for medical device connectivity, and there are some pretty powerful things happening. Think about what happens as spatial device connectivity comes to everyday things around you — such as a baseball bat! Read more below. There’s a lot going on in this space, and you’d do well to understand it.

Opportunity through the next decade is going to be found by those who will adjust and adapt buisness models, attitudues, structures, methodologies and capabilities to this new reality.

More information:

• HealthCare Innovation & Technology Conference
• Read about what happens When Thermostats get connected
• Read the article about bio-connectivity, The Doctor is in around the clock
• Read the article Minds of their own
• Read “Bioconnectivity and the rapid emergence of new markets”
• Read the article Command and Control – Opportunity Awaits Companies that Master Hyperconnectivity