Innovating the Mundane
Cars
that drive themselves or run on fuel cells! Space
tourismand manned missions to Mars! Tunnel-based loops that transport people at high speed in underground
pods! Everywhere you look, futuristic whiz-bang technologies that promise to
usher in a golden age filled with a higher quality of life are being promoted
as potential near-term realities.
Yet
there’s a general pessimism about what the future holds. In the U.S., only 37
percent of adults believe their children will be better off financially than
their parents when they grow up, according to the Pew Research
Center. In Japan, one of the world’s most
technologically advanced economies, only 9 percent believe so.
There
are a lot of reasons for the simmering
discontent about the future in the midst of
massive technological promise. It’s not because technology can’t do all the
wonderful things its promoters promise. After all, we all walk around with a
powerful computer in our pocket, have the ability to get our genome decoded and
explained with a simple test, and take driving directions from brilliant
navigational tools.
Rather, the dissonance comes when we realize
that, for all the technology that promises to replace and displace existing
systems, most of it doesn’t seem to be trying to make our existing systems work
better — or stop them from getting worse. For example, I read a lot about
exciting new projects while sitting on the train that takes me 50 miles from
suburban Connecticut to midtown Manhattan, a trip that now takes 15 minutes
longer than it did 15 years ago.
It’s great that people are thinking about
ways to make many of our existing, annoying systems irrelevant. But what if we
could apply some of that engineering talent, imagination, and capital to simply
make the stuff we use right now work a little better? We certainly have the
tools at our grasp.
For example, cars powered by hydrogen fuel
cells could be a key to enabling mobility without emissions, which would thus
improve air quality, reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and make fuel less
expensive. And although the technology already exists to make vehicles of all
sizes significantly more energy efficient, auto manufacturers have chosen not
to roll them out comprehensively. The technology to make a train move from my
station in Connecticut to Grand Central in 55 minutes exists, but the operators
of the system haven’t invested the resources necessary to allow it to function
at a higher level.
In economic circles, it has become
fashionable to argue that the world has run out of opportunities to roll out
important big innovations. In the absence of a step change, this argument goes,
we won’t get a big leap in productivity — and hence in growth — and there will
be a shortage of opportunities in which capital can be invested.
The
reality is that opportunities for increases in productivity are everywhere.
There are big gains to be realized by simply bringing technologies that have
been around for a century or more to places that haven’t yet had the
opportunity to benefit from them. Last year, a train line
connecting Addis Ababa in Ethiopia and Djibouti opened, which will reduce the travel time between
the two end points from 10 days to 10 hours.
Meanwhile, we can take all sorts of
incremental steps by upgrading existing systems with existing technology. In
many large industries — manufacturing, logistics, e-commerce — optimization
that produces marginal gains, year after year, is the order of the day. But in
too many areas and industries, including the ones that directly affect how we
feel about our quality of life, we seem to have lost the capacity or appetite
for building sustained incremental improvements.
To be sure, optimizing existing systems is
less romantic and appealing — and perhaps less profitable — than concocting
entirely new ways of doing things. The prospect of making trains move 2 percent
faster may not fire the imaginations of young engineers. But the economic and
psychological impact of doing so for a few years in a row would be immense.
Shaving a minute off a daily one-hour rail commute would give a typical person
an extra eight hours of time annually.
More
significantly, the imperative for improvement is greater than the need for
blue-sky innovation. It’s exciting to think that a few people might to go Mars
one day. But what matters to most people today is having their flights taking
off on time. A hyperloop would be awesome. But it would be even more awesome if
our existing trains could move just a little more quickly next year than they
do now — and then move a little more quickly the year after that. Pharmaceuticals
designed to address individuals’ specific health needs would be a quantum leap.
But just imagine the immense gains we could reap right now if we could simply
reduce the level of wasted medical spending from
its current level of 20 percent.
Innovation and futuristic thinking is great,
and can certainly spur some people to think about the future in a more positive
light. But it’s likely that an increased emphasis on optimization right now
could boost our collective optimism
Daniel Gross
https://www.strategy-business.com/blog/Innovating-the-Mundane?gko=54f29&utm_source=itw&utm_medium=20171102&utm_campaign=resp
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