The following guest post is by Seth Priebatsch, Chief Ninja and CEO of LevelUp.
There are a lot of people who believe innovation is dead. And I’m not going to sugar-coat anything, some of their arguments are solid. Just listen to academic Robert Gordon or big-time entrepreneurs Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, and you might even be convinced yourself. But don’t be. Because while the arguments might appeal to the crotchety old man in each of us, they’re dead wrong.
The reasoning of innovation pessimists goes something like this: innovations of the past-- like the toilet, refrigeration, and the polio vaccine-- solved massive problems and changed the world. But innovations of today-- like
While these arguments seem well-founded (we haven't yet solved global warming and somebody really ought get on it), they're missing the point. Innovation isn’t broken, it’s just different. Rather than tackling today’s problems head-on, as previous generations have done, we’re choosing to rebuild the infrastructures that will enable future innovations to take on these problems. Why? Because the problems are actually quite literally too big to tackle head on. First we need better tools, then we can begin to attempt to solve the problems. So, the innovation of our generation is around building those tools, not their end result. I call this infrastructural innovation. It may be more subtle, but it’s no less grand than innovation of the past.
Before we delve into those innovations, a natural question arises: why don’t we have the foundations in place to go after modern problems? Because the problems we face today are scaling with population growth (i.e. exponentially). Issues like global warming, overcrowded cities, and the growing demand for energy are getting increasingly harder to fix as population growth magnifies the scope of these problems. But, most of the infrastructures we use to fix these problems are built to scale linearly. At the time these infrastructures were built, this made sense. Need more education? Build another school. Need more power? Build another power plant. But today, the growth of problems is outpacing this linear methodology. We face a situation where we have problems scaling exponentially and an ability to solve these problems growing linearly, causing an infrastructural innovation gap.
Our generation's version of putting a man on the moon is to close that infrastructural innovation gap, to come up with the new infrastructures that will ultimately equip us to innovate more quickly, and give us a fighting shot at solving global warming, oil dependence and fending off the alien invasion currently slated for 2037.
Here are three examples of where infrastructural innovators are hard at work:
The need for better quality education is growing faster than our ability to effectively supply it. Our generation is working to close this gap by rebuilding the education infrastructure with organizations like inBloom, which provide the technology schools need to quickly analyze a student's’ performance and respond with personalized learning. There’s a lot of debate around whether a technology can educate students better than teachers, but I think that's the wrong question. The better question is, "Do we really believe the system we use today can scale well enough to educate 7 billion people?" No! It’s absurd to believe teachers can provide individualized learning for every student as classroom sizes grow exponentially. And this is why we're starting to feel the effects of being on the wrong end of the structural innovation gap. We simply aren’t providing a quality education fast enough. Does that mean InBloom is as massive an innovation as a toilet? Maybe not, but with it increasing education quality, it guarantees us more toilets in the future.
Manufacturing
We need to make it easier to make the things we make. With our centralized manufacturing infrastructure, developing anything involves serious capital and time, a process that’s holding us back from innovating as quickly as we need to be. Improvements in this infrastructure are in the process of being made by a group of engineering professors from MIT, Harvard and UPenn, who are working to develop computer technology that will enable anyone to quickly and easily produce a customized, functioning robot for manufacturing. The group envisions a future where robots can be created by an average person in a matter of hours, rather than by specialized engineers in a matter of years. By de-centralizing access to manufacturing and simplifying the process, we’re giving ourselves a chance to innovate at the same rate as population and bridge the innovation gap.
Commerce
The payment infrastructure has come a long way since bartering, but it’s still holding us back from being able to innovate as quickly as we need to. In its current state, our payment infrastructure has tremendous points of friction: high credit card processing fees for merchants, poor access to banking needs globally, and the anti-competitive duopoly of Mastercard and
The shift in this infrastructure is currently being powered, at least in some part, by mobile payments. Innovations like m-pesa, which allow people in Kenya to exchange money using only their cell phones, have transformed local economies that previously had little access to banks, making it far easier for anyone who comes up with an idea to instantly partake in the global economy. Mobile payments may not be the complete solution to fixing our payment infrastructure, but it has already proven to be a part of the solution. By allowing for commerce to more easily occur, we’re building the foundation for a better functioning economy that will have the resources to bridge the innovation gap.
So, when you look at exactly what our generation has been doing-- rebuilding our ability as a society to innovate-- it’s pretty easy to see that innovation is far from dead, it’s just different than the kind of innovation than we’ve seen in the past. Tackling these infrastructures that will enable us to innovate more rapidly is no small task, but it’s necessary for us to be able to fix the infrastructural innovation gap and enable innovation to scale with the problems that are growing with our population.
So, to all the innovators out there-- keep creating with one eye towards scale and one eye towards the future. And to all the naysayers-- be patient. By the time you retire to your beach houses on South Beach, we'll have built the infrastructures needed to close the innovation gap and will be able to tackle the massive problems we face today, and the even bigger one's we'll be facing then too.
Seth Priebatsch founded his first web start-up at the age of 12. It failed gloriously. He launched his second startup in high school, which did much better, but by college he was ready to build something even bigger. After completing his freshman year at Princeton, Seth took a "leave-of-absence" to found SCVNGR, now parent company of mobile payment network LevelUp.
