Most would rally behind the belief that technology ought to change the world for the better— solve problems that matter! Innovation!. That is all fine and well except that the last two decades of innovation methods don’t explain how to do any of that. And yet, using technology to level the playing field, doing good and doing well, and learning to invent and innovate with what you have are the kind of superpowers many hope for when the word innovation is invoked.
I’ve spent the last two decades wrestling with the question of how to do innovation, not just how it happens, or how it threatens what you do, but what it means and how do you do it. Along this time I’ve shepherded over 200 technologies from MIT (Deep tech!) to impact; educated thousands at MIT and worldwide across all disciplines from policy to business and engineering on how to innovate; helped translate research into societal meaning; built factories of innovation in industry and venture capital where we systematically invent and create new organizations; and have built technology companies myself using artificial intelligence to derive new uses from existing large scale infrastructures.
I’d very much like to engage you in a conversation about what about innovation, if anything, may be useful to you as we start the post-pandemic reconstruction—we’ve had enough disruption already. I’ll draw from my experience at MIT and building innovation factories to discuss how to innovate efficiently with technology; that is, how to conceive diversified technology organizations, how to meaningfully de-risk them, and what it takes to scale up a robust organization. To make the conversation lively, I’d like to ask you to entertain three ideas that I believe should be straightforward but that the way we went about innovation before the pandemic has made look contrarian:
The organizations that survive are the ones that fail to fail. Failing fast does not prepare you for that. Spending little by little is a tried and tested method to waste money without noticing. So-called lean startup methods contribute innovation waste. You can set up a process to test tens of ideas for the capital it would take you to fail predictably at one, and in so doing make doing well and doing good affordable. Join us for a conversation about what it takes to conceive, invent, design, plan, de-risk and ultimately build organizations that use technology as a tool to solve problems that matter sustainably. That is doing well and doing good.