From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Right now, is the absolute best time in human history to be a disruptor. The world is awash with cash chasing disruptive ideas and most companies have one (if not both) hands tied behind their back.
Even if there was no climate change… even if there was no problem with the environment… we would still need to replace the polluting infrastructure we have because it is too expensive and too outdated compared to modern, efficient, infrastructure.
Super-specialisation at the expense of a breadth of knowledge is a modern-day fallacy. Fundamentally, we need to be able to address facts in an unbiased fashion. If you're super-specialised in one particular area, at the expense of that breadth, at the expense of clarity of vision, it is natural you will accumulate biases that will factor into your decision making.
It's been a high-speed laboratory for the most advanced electric cars in the world, which Formula E cars are.
In 2008 there was one company which applied for more patents than all the others put together, this company was IBM.
More important than picking specific industries, what matters is ensuring competitive and innovative companies that are able to compete in international markets.
It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world... it's going to be a game changer.
Kodak had been living in linear-time, something which is intuitive to most of us, where we think in days, weeks, months, years… The world had already started to shift when people like Steve Jobs started to take-advantage of the fact that you could connect the dots.
I wasn't thinking about success or being 'big' or creating a huge business. I was thinking about answering a need, a void, creating something that wasn't there before.
The danger is that when we jump too quickly to the solution, not only is the floor littered with the inventions that never worked, but we risk designing solutions that never fit the problem.
Research shows that two-thirds of employees say that new ideas are greeted with skepticism or outright hostility and only one in ten employees genuinely feel they have the freedom to experiment with new methods, products and solutions.
Design is the great 're-configurer' of problems for business…for example design takes an engineering solution for transmitting signals called a phone and reconfigures it into a hyper complex problem of glass and metal shapes, etc.