It’s sometime in the future, and the next version of your favourite smartphone has just been released. Once again, the marketing hype is astounding, but the reality is disappointing. What did they say: it’s a few millimetres smaller (or bigger), and slightly lighter, and the camera has some extra megapixels and zoom, and… that’s it?
Smartphones should be curing cancer already. There’s more computing power in my smartphone than existed on the entire planet when I was born half a century ago.
As much as we live in a technology world, innovation seems to have stalled a bit. We’ve got multi-billion dollar companies competing with each other for incremental improvements in features that are already good enough. What we really want is innovation that excites and delights, that makes a real difference to our lived experience, and that changes the world.
This week’s ThrowForward Thursday is bordering on a rant, but it has an important point to make. What is your company doing to create new products and services that excite and delight your customers and clients? We need to uplift our innovation goals and aim to do much more than merely optimise stuff that’s already good enough.
TRANSCRIPT
Oh, sorry, I’m just checking out the latest pre-release smartphone that’s just been sent to me, and what a mess. Seriously, I don’t know what version this is, Is it 17, 18, 22, 28? I don’t even know what year it is.
It’s ThrowForward Thursday, I’m Graeme Codrington. We’re sometime in the future, and we’ve still got a problem with our smartphones. Come on, guys. It’s decades after the first smartphone was introduced, and you give us a new one every year, and I look at the specs update, and it’s slightly narrower by maybe a millimetre, it’s a little bit lighter by a few grams, it’s got some buttons on the side that are new that can do things like control the camera a bit better. Oh, the camera. It’s got, let me check my notes here, I don’t know, 10 extra megapixels than the last one did, and three times extra digital Zoom. Wow… and the price tag, is always high.
Hey, guys, I think we’ve got a problem. I don’t think that we are seeing innovation anymore. We live in an age of technology where all of the hype in our business magazines and our technology, online blogs and podcasts, and all of the hype of the companies that come out of Silicon Valley and Taiwan and China and all the places in the world that are coming up with these new technologies, hype machines that keep telling us we live in this digital age where so much new exciting stuff is happening. But is it?
I mean these things; these smartphones should be curing cancer already. They should be making a real significant difference in my life, saving me time, saving me money, saving my life, improving my health and well-being. I don’t want to be that grumpy old guy sitting on the porch shouting at the world, but I really do feel that our technology, especially our smartphone technology, is just a little bit stuck at the moment.
This is not quite that Steve Jobs, this is an iPhone moment from 2007 anymore. We’ve built massive, multi-billion-dollar organisations that seem very, very comfortable with very small, minor incremental improvements in their product each year that are just optimising what we’ve already got without really exciting, exhilarating, surprising us with something that really does change our lives.
Okay, rant over. But if we’re going to think like futurists and pretend that we live in an age of technology and digital advancement, we’d better start actually doing things that impact the lives of ordinary people and not just put more money into the pockets of those who optimise the technology that we’ve already got.
Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED Talk. This was ThrowForward Thursday, sometime in the future, I really hope that the next edition of whatever smartphone you use really does change your life.
As always, if you would like to be inspired by the future, yes, today wasn’t really inspiring, but hopefully what it does do is inspire you to imagine in your business what products and services you can offer to your market, to your customers and clients that will surprise and delight them, not just improve what they already expect from you. If we can help you to do that, contact me, contact our team. We love to take you into the future and see what we can do there together.
I’ll see you next week.
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Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognised futurist, specialising in the future of work. He helps organisations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change. Chat to us about booking Graeme to help you Re-Imagine and upgrade your thinking to identify the emerging opportunities in your industry.
For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognised brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.