A flush of hearts and wheels

In one of my sessions today I was with a client and we were talking innovation, nothing specific, just the processes and he mentioned that he sees a reduction in the width of innovation where there is more innovation through combination rather than anything overly innovative. Just in case you are wondering, this is coming from a person who designed parts that went up to the international space station while in university, he knows a thing or two about a thing or two.

What I added was how the speed of communication has sped the innovation process astronomically over time. If we take the wheel as an example, it appeared all over the world, albeit centuries or perhaps millennia apart. However, there was no communication (as far as we know) between these points which meant, lots of people had the same idea.

Imagine 200 years ago a pair of scientists collaborating on work together, one in London and the other in New York. As they exchanged their ideas via letter, a ten year working relationship would be a handful of envelopes as information crossing the seas took time. This is of course instant now and masses of data can travel at lightspeed around the globe and, it is accessible by millions of people simultaneously.

While this should be driving innovation ever faster, there is also a problem where more and more people are eating from the same data sources. What this means is that ideas that they themselves might have and consider innovative, have a much higher likelihood of other people discovering it at the same time, much like the global development of the wheel, only sped up.

For about the last 15 years I have been working with various businesses in various industries and quickly realized that while each industry is largely siloed in their view, I had a sneak peak across their range. I noticed that what one R&D team considered innovative was also being developed in another industry by another R&D team who also considered it innovative. What happens when everyone has the same innovative idea? Well, it isn't very innovative as it is a trend. This doesn't mean it doesn't have value though.

What I have noticed more recently (over the last two years) is the growing drive toward blockchain by companies that do not know that they are driving toward blockchain, they think they are innovative in the way they are handling their data but what they are doing is essentially paving the way for their methods to be replaced by a simple blockchain ledger. As I believe, this is the paradigm shift that will take blockchain tech mainstream, not because it is innovative itself, but because it is a natural progression from what they are already searching for and, moving toward.

This is happening in many different ways from many different perspectives, from the way they are attempting to manage their company files, accounting practices and resource planning, to the tokenization of loyalty cards and gaming. At the moment they don't seem to realize that they are all actually developing toward the same thing because, they don't overlap their knowledge bases. It is happening though.

Do you remember when Apple trained everyone to use an iPhone before they had a phone product? Remember when they changed the use case of a phone they didn't have yet by creating a very slick MP3 player? Nokia didn't recognise the bait-and-switch in play and instead felt comfortable with their position and 60% market share. How many of you are reading this on a Nokia now?

The age of the smartphone went from a Nokia Communicator to what you are likely holding in very short time frame and in so doing, opened up some of the most valuable industries in the world today in regards to digital products and services.

They also opened something else in that process, personal banking capabilities where anyone can be a bank - We are testing and proving that here on Steem already. Of course, this goes beyond just having an internet banking account, it is an economy in and of itself yet, it has barely even scratched the surface of where it is going to go in the next few years.

This opens up a whole range of other products and services that most people haven't considered. How many people out there have earned something while posting from their phone? Everyone on Steem probably. How many ways can people use their phone to earn currently? And then, once the banking connects up to the content, products and services, there is going to be a flood of users looking to utilize their phone to earn, then buy, subscribe, transfer, trade and all kinds f other activities that are going to be transacted across blockchains.

Being a personal bank these days isn't just being able to move some currency, it is being able to function and benefit of many of the same activities at a micro scale. There is only one current way to cost-effectively and efficiently move these numbers of transactions and do it in an environment that requires trusting the untrusted at a micro level with the flexibility so that it can reach everyone with a smart phone and an internet connection. That is about 3.5 billion people and likely, once the benefits are returned, more will be brought into the fold as it is also the best way to manage people.

Yes, there is a lot of uncertainty in individual projects and yes, a more innovative product than blockchain could be developed but, the trend is out there and it is being propagated by corporations and development teams who don't even know that they are laying the groundwork for a blockchain to underlay everything they do. I see it daily across various companies in diversified industries, I see it in the work I myself am involved in.

The thing that I find interesting is that it is developing organically and much like a decentralized system already as they are not aware of each other but, they are trending along the same lines. This is because as a whole, the information we and the developers have access to is the same across the globe and is inspiring similar ideas that they think are industry specific. At some point, each decentralized node will bump into another and begin to cooperate and leverage each other until all nodes are part of a network, all servicing diversified use cases with a common thread that ties them all together.

Once upon a time, there were people who thought the internet was a fad that would disappear while simultaneously those same people were supporting its future ubiquity in the way they behaved and, the products they bought. They just didn't know it and likely, still don't realize at what point they accepted it as normal. It was the same for mobile phones. It was the same for cars and trains.

It was the same for the wheel.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]