Forget Technology: Innovation Is a People Problem!

Another good session by Stephen Prentice about innovation, but not strictly from a technology point of view, for once. The point here is why and how people innovate.

The starting point is about what's going on out there. There are 3 major trends to aknowledge:

• Demographics and "destiny", which affect the social fabric (for example, the 1-child per family policy in China leads to an explosive growth of social networking);
• Technology, but with a focus on usability and expectations: young people don't care about the technology for its own sake but only about what it enables (it could just be magic for all they care);
• Globalization and the decreasing cultural separatism.

The consequences are:

• The democratization of technology: there are more choices than ever on hardware, software, services...
  
• The communities (with an interesting "Dunbar's number": when a community gets larger than 150 people, it becomes unstable and splits in 2; large communities are, in reality, an aggregation of smaller ones with shared intersects involving critical members).
  
• Workforce changes, with more reliance and dependability on technology. The CIO of George's Bank (Australia) said: "unless we give people the tools they want, we won't be able to staff".
  
• Externalization (with uncontrollable things happening outside).

Innovation is not technology. It is the association of (multiple) technologies, (multiple) people and user experience (you have to think about HOW people use the technology).

I = Tⁿ + Pⁿ + E

"Technology succeed when it meets a need that people care about." Watch how people are using technology. Or think about what is not being delivered (for example, employees using Gmail because it has no space limitations, contrary to the internal mail applications)…

What can you do? Nothing! Otherwise you might kill the innovation.

Technology does not run the business, people do. Innovation does not grow the business, people do. People are the ONLY way to tranform the business.

The presentation did not mean to answer questions (there are no easy answers) but to raise the audience curiosity.