I’m sitting here in 2020 reminiscing over the evolution of innovation and the ever increasing speed of change over the last few decades.

I remember back to late last century when I lectured undergraduates in innovation and we used a six step seven year process as our model – can you believe it?

Haven’t things changed, no one has time for six steps now, let alone 7 years.

Innovation now has to be almost instant.

Take the use of Claytronics, how did we ever live without it? Oh yeah you haven’t seen this yet, have you?

Claytronics is sort of like your old fax machine, but instead of sending and receiving paper based copies, it sends and receives 3D objects.

Last week my wife bought an entire dinner set this way. She picked the design and pieces she wanted, customised the size of each of the dishes, Suzie her on line avatar ordered it for her and then hey-presto our in home machine whirred and giggled and out came the dinner set ready to use – just like a store bought one.

Who would have thought that we would be able to purchase objects on line, have them personalised and delivered to us in real time and it all started as an innovation off the good old Claytronics machine.

One of the big pushes over the last decade has been the need for businesses to me more in tune with their customers, staff, suppliers and stakeholders. I know this is an old and well worn tune, but in 2020 we either live by this or die not heeding this.

Social networks (FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter and tonnes of others) began to become popular roughly in 2005 (some early forms were around from 1995) and you’ve seen a couple of years of how they have changed the world.

I remember the headline in September 2008 “Social networks are more popular than porn”. HitWise announced the results of a survey they had completed of 10 million internet users’ finding that search traffic had increased to social network sites and decreased to porn sites.

The reality in 2020 is that the internet is all about reaching out to and interacting with others. Social networks is where this all started to become possible.

In my next postcard I want to tell you about five (5) really easy ways to innovate your product or service using you’re extended on line community. These are really easy profitable ways my clients have been using to figure out what to innovate, how to innovate and how to get prospective and existing customers to do it for them, for FREE.

Of course if you can’t wait till then I’d be happy to fill you in before. Give me a call (61 3) 9525 8600 or email me and we can talk it through.

The beauty of the future is it’s unwritten. You can make of it whatever you want.

Your challenge, between now and the next postcard, is to figure out what you want from you business so that together we can figure out how to make it happen for you.

Anyway I’ve got to go now and of course wish you were here in 2020, but I know that’s not physically possible, but I can do the next best thing and show you what it will look like, if you click here.

It will show you the world of 2020, who lives in it, how we live, work and play in it and I know it will definitely start you thinking about what you and your organisation need to do to get ready for the world of 2020.

That link again is (that’s such an old fashioned thing to say): http://www.morrisyoureyeonthefuture.com/2020.html

I’ll send you another Postcard from the Future soon, but until then take care and remember your future hasn’t been written yet and how it will look and what successes you will have, are entirely up to you.

Your friend in the future.

Morris Miselowski

 

you can subscribe to my postcard series at my website