From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
People really don't oppose new technologies but they question the way they are used so the challenges are more social than they are technological.
We believe innovation should be a continuous activity. It should be a capability that you are developing and attending to regularly. It requires a kind of fodder of new problems all the time in order to be refining and developing.
Fundamentally, we must slow-down the process of change. We should recognise that most change is not progress- and therefore, it is in our interests to slow down without interfering too much with actual solution making.
If one aspires to make a positive impact on the world, shouldn't we strive for innovative solutions, perhaps even for a disease as formidable as cancer?
The way an orchestra is normally structured is cast in the image of what people in the 18th century thought society should look like. It's very top-down, a hierarchical power structure… I wanted to subvert that by creating a new orchestral structure that reflected how society could be.
Entrepreneurial businesses innovate, change, evolve and meet customer needs… it's about creating things that people value and love.
Being an entrepreneur, an inventor, is about having ideas and having the doggedness to see them through. As an inventor your ideas should be based on creating a solution to a problem – a solution which focuses on function over form.
It's the convergence of technologies at any given time that allow individuals to achieve the things which simply were not possible before. Your smartphone can be used to diagnose diseases for example – every disease has a pattern.
AI has been an area of technology for many decades, but the advances of the past five-years show us why this is one of the major technology events of the last several centuries.
If you really want innovation, you have to say 'no' a lot of times to what's incremental. Saying 'no' reinforces that the small stuff isn't enough.
Playing chess, I learned the dramatic effect combining humans and machines. Humans have intuition, can recognise patterns and positions, and machines have brute-force of calculation and memory. By bringing these capabilities together in other walks of life, we can achieve incredible results.
If you want to have a great startup idea, don't try to think of a startup. If you focus on creating a startup, you'll be grounding yourself in the present, studying customers living in the present, their problems in the present, and their unmet needs in the present.