We can name some of the driving forces for innovation in the near future. As Thomas Friedman puts it, the world is increasingly hot, flat, and crowded, which is to say that climate change, electronic connectivity, and growth of tropical megacities will impact everything. Because electronic communication is now global, instant, and essentially free, change will continue to accelerate and see its swings exaggerated. Our grandparents saw just one or two Schumpeter technology cycles in a lifetime, now these cycles arrive and pass at a rate of 3 or 4 per career: the pace of change has increased to the point where it is visible to everyone, and many would say disruptive. The swings are not just faster but also wider: the late-2008 financial meltdown is a stark reminder of the amplifying domino effect of our connectivity. These will be the pervasive forces calling for innovation: faster, wider, chaotic change against a backdrop of unprecedented global climate and demographic shifts. There will be no lack of problems crying for new solutions.
At the same time, the same electronic connectivity is opening the gates to truly universal participation. Billions of people with cell phones or commodity-priced computers connect to each other, for entertainment, family, social, and business reasons. They use their phones for price optimization in villages in India, and to reshape participative democracy in choosing American presidents.
What will the future look like then? Huge, complex, urgent problems, and billions of connected people, many willing and wanting to make their lives better. A necessity facing an opportunity.
But there is a gap in the middle, and "interface mismatch" if you will. Millions of people can blog all they want about their ideas for cheaper energy, accessible health care, carbon footprints, or political change. But the solutions will be complex, multidisciplinary, and fiercely detailed mixtures of politics, economics, and technology. This will give rise to a new species, the Web-Footed Boomer*. These professionals, with a career's worth of technical and professional experience, a sudden personal economic imperative, and the connectivity of the web, will become an army of "human integrators". They will place themselves to face large, complex problems (with which they are familiar from their traditional careers), and at the same time, because they are working alone or in small organizations, will turn for support to the global electronic network to amplify their effectiveness. Under consultant-type contracts from sponsoring organizations, they will be catalysts for innovation by approaching large complex problems by integrating of hundreds of micro-sized pieces of solutions, gleaned from millions of participants on the web.
* As in Baby Boomer, because professionals with science and technology skills are now retiring from their primary careers at a rate far above the West's replacement capacity. Polls show that many Boomers will retire from their primary career in their late 50's (not always by choice!), but expect (and need) to keep working to their late 60's. This is the decade of their opportunity.
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