The world of exponentially advancing technologies, driving new companies and new ways of working, new markets and new customer possibilities, means that our traditional linear approaches to business no longer work.

A typical smart phone today has more than four times the processing power of a typical supercomputer built in the 1980s. Humankind has created more data in the past two years than in all of previous human history.

With the pace of technology development – artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud and blockchain – continuing to increase, how can firms prepare to disrupt first before they are disrupted?

Here are some leading minds on the theme of “disrupt or be disrupted”:

“The Stages of Business Disruption,” by Deloitte tells a simple story of business and digital transformation, providing insight as well as a laugh. The point is that every business is digital today, and physical. Every business needs to disrupt itself, because otherwise somebody is waiting out there to disrupt it:

Exponential technologies create powerful opportunities for entrepreneurs, harnessing the network effects to multiply the impact of traditional businesses. In this video, Peter Diamandis demonstrates how tech enables startups to take on well-established businesses and industries.

Scott Anthony, CEO of Innosight and based in Singapore is a fantastic author, most recently of the book Dual Transformation. Here he is on how large organizations can successfully reinvent themselves and counter challenges from digitally enabled start-ups:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJFAtBJsQ44

What really make people disruptive? Malcolm Gladwell, the man who gave us bestselling concepts like The Tipping Point and Outsiders, shares what he sees as the 3 characteristics of successful disruptors. Creativity, conscientiousness and a last character trait you wouldn’t expect.

Clay Christiansen has a particular take on “disruption”, slightly obsessively focused on how technology-based products can challenge each other over time. Here he applies his model of how an inferior technology often beats a superior, and how to forecast where it will happen next:

Claudia Batten talks about squiggling … In 2002 she co-founded Massive Incorporated, a new platform for advertising in video games which 4 years later she sold the company to Microsoft. She then founded Victors & Spoils, the first advertising agency built on crowdsourcing, and sold it to Havas.

Explore more here:

We all know about Moore’s Law.

The theory dates back to 1965 yet has been proved correct for five decades. Back in 1965, co-founder of chip giant Intel, Gordon Moore, made an observation that transistors were doubling in size every two years. Or put another, processing power doubles every two years. The period is often quoted as 18 months because Moore’s Intel colleague David House, predicted that chip performance would double even faster though a combination of the effect of more transistors and the transistors being faster.

However the rate of progress could be slowing down. According to a recent report from the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) transistors could get to a point where they could shrink no further by as soon as 2021. The companies argue that, by that time, it will be no longer economically viable to make them smaller, finally putting an end to Moore’s Law.

More important is Metcalfe’s Law.

In 1960, Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com developed a model to demonstrate the power of communication devices, initially focused on phones and fax machines. Later he extended the concept to include the internet, and the connection between users and content in everything from social media to sports fans. Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of participants. Or put simply, every time you connect another person into a network, and therefore able to make many more connections, the impact is multiplied, and becomes exponential.

This is not about the technology itself, it is about how the technology enables networks to work – how they enable people to connect with each other, to collaborate and influence, to build mutual affinity and trust. Communities emerge, particularly relevant in what we call the sharing economy, and where the power of influence is the primary source of sales. Movements are a step even further in making networks work, giving them purpose, values and momentum. This might sound obvious. But think how many retailers do nothing to connect their consumers, particularly those with similar interests. Even telecom brands, with billions of users, do almost nothing to add value beyond the basic connections it provides.

In 2015, three Chinese academics – Zhang, Liu and Xu – tested Metcalfe’s Law on  data from Tencent, China’s largest social network company, and Facebook. Their work showed that Metcalfe’s law held for both, despite the difference in audience between the two sites – Facebook serving a worldwide audience and Tencent serving only Chinese users. The Metcalfe’s functions of the two sites given in the paper were and respectively.

Making Networks Work

NFX is a consulting firm dedicated to unlocking network effects. Here is an extract from its article on capturing the benefits:

The Big 5 — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon — are hitting all time high valuations. Airbnb is worth more than Hilton in the private market. Uber is worth more than GM. Spotify and Dropbox IPOed in 2018, with Slack and Didi Chuxing on an IPO track

It’s fitting they should all be mentioned in the same breath, because other than Amazon, their business DNA is amazingly similar. They are all network effect businesses. And it turns out that most of the outsized returns of companies since 1994 have used network effects.

If you know the playbook, you shouldn’t be shocked at these companies’ rapid growth. But it’s surprising how few people know the network effects playbook. Many still confuse it with viral effects. Many know it’s important, but don’t know what it means.

We wanted to put an actual number on the amount of value network effects have created in the digital world. The short answer: over the past 23 years, network effects have accounted for approximately 70% of the value creation in tech.

We did a study of the digital companies that were founded since the Internet was widely available in 1994 and that went on to become worth more than a $1 billion. 336 companies between 1994 and 2017 met this criteria.

By looking at each of the companies’ business models and comparing them to our list of 13 known network effects, we estimate 35 percent of those companies had network effects at their core. They were, however, typically much more valuable than companies without network effects so they added up to 68% of the total value in our spreadsheet.

In other words, companies that leverage network effects have asymmetric upside. They punch above their weight. They are the Davids that beat the Goliaths, and then become the Goliaths.

The other 65% of $1B+ companies used other defensibilities to create their value— namely embedding, scale and brand. These are good approaches, and created 219 $1B+ companies. 65% of the total. But those companies’ valuations typically top out in the $1-$2B range, leading to the results of this study.

Network effects are the most important driver of tech-enabled value.

It turns out that having a network effect is the single most predictable attribute of the highest value technology companies — other than perhaps “having a great CEO.”

And yet surprisingly, only 20 percent of the business plans we came across before starting NFX had network effects in them.

We believe that most founders fail to design network effects into their businesses because they don’t understand them well enough. And not understanding them, they don’t build them in from the beginning.

It’s sad to watch, because just as the Big Five are now consolidating their dominant threat to startups, and just as startups have lost the favorable winds of the Internet and mobile tech shifts, most founders are missing a key ingredient they will need to have a dog in the fight.

Unless founders wise up to the importance and discipline of network effects, the scales will be heavily tipped in favor of those who have.

If Your Startup Doesn’t Have Network Effects, You Need to Rethink Your Strategy.

Given their importance, it’s surprising there are only a few places to learn about network effects. We typically send people to HBS, Platformed, our thoughts on network effects and taxonomywith A16Z, NFX Essays, and other academic sources.

Network effects will increase in importance because the new platforms — and the re-invented verticals — are being born networked:

– Crypto-Assets
– Synthetic
– Biology
– Augmented Reality
– Artificial Intelligence
– Virtual Reality
– Internet of Things
– Robotics
– Drones
– Transportation
– Smart Cities
– Agriculture
– Health Care
– FinTech

Understanding the principles of network effects and applying them to new companies today should produce the same or greater defensibility and value-creation advantages that we saw in post-1994 companies, particularly because there are now over 3B people networked to the Internet. If I have to design an AI company with or without network effects, I’ll take the one with network effects every time.

When you’re creating your digital business, architect your product to allow users to participate in value creation. Let their use of the product add value to the other users. Let customer 2 add value to customer 1. This makes the company defensible because competitors have a hard time adding as much value to users once you get ahead, and defensibility creates value.

If history tells us anything, the next SnapChat, Airbnb, and Uber will be created in the next twenty-four months. While the next billion dollar startup won’t look just like those companies on the outside, it’s a good bet that they will have network effects on the inside.

15 years ago I sat down with some colleagues to write a book called “The Complete CEO”.

We spent much of our time debating what exactly a CEO needed to do, and what he or she should leave to others. Not many people have tried to define that, and our experience showed there was significant confusion – with CEOs, with boards, with executive teams, and headhunters.

A few years later when I myself became a CEO, I realised how easy it is to get sucked into everything. You can easily feel the weight of the company on your shoulders, and you can easily get distracted by short-term pressures or innovative ideas for the future, which distract you from the fundamentals.

Knowing what CEOs need to do, and what to empower others to do, became incredibly simple yet powerful. A recent report from Bain & Co confirms this.  Indeed, the principles have net changed much in the last 15 years, despite the digitalisation, globalisation and acceleration of business.

So here are the 4 priorities for CEOs:

The Strategy Priority

The People Priority

The Action Priority

The Leadership Priority

The capacity to endure is the key trait that underlies great performance in virtually every field. But what if we all can go farther, push harder, and achieve more than we think we’re capable of?

Alex Hutchinson’s book “Endure” is about the mind, body and the curiously elastic limits of human performance.

It blends cutting-edge science and gripping storytelling in the spirit of Malcolm Gladwell—who contributes the book’s foreword—award-winning journalist Alex Hutchinson reveals that a wave of paradigm-altering research over the past decade suggests the seemingly physical barriers you encounter as set as much by your brain as by your body. This means the mind is the new frontier of endurance—and that the horizons of performance are much more elastic than we once thought.

But, of course, it’s not “all in your head.” For each of the physical limits that Hutchinson explores—pain, muscle, oxygen, heat, thirst, fuel—he carefully disentangles the delicate interplay of mind and body by telling the riveting stories of men and women who’ve pushed their own limits in extraordinary ways.

The longtime “Sweat Science” columnist for Outside and Runner’s World, Hutchinson, a former national-team long-distance runner and Cambridge-trained physicist, was one of only two reporters granted access to Nike’s top-secret training project to break the two-hour marathon barrier, an extreme quest he traces throughout the book. But the lessons he draws from shadowing elite athletes and from traveling to high-tech labs around the world are surprisingly universal. Endurance, Hutchinson writes, is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop”—and we’re always capable of pushing a little farther.

Jake Knapp began running design sprints at Google in 2010. He worked with teams like Chrome, Google Search and Google X. In 2012, Jake brought sprints to Google Ventures and started applying the methodology to external companies.

The sprint methodology embraces story-centered design, an unconventional approach that focuses on the customer journey instead of individual features or technologies. It also takes customer research—which can typically take weeks to plan and often delivers confusing results—and figures out a way to get crystal clear results in just one day. Crucial is to start at the end, and focus on measuring results with the key metrics from each business. It’s also good to have the insights of a resident entrepreneur on the team to ensure every step made sense in the real world.

The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. Developed at GV, it’s a “greatest hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavior science, design thinking, and more—packaged into a battle-tested process that any team can use.

Working together in a sprint, you can shortcut the endless-debate cycle and compress months of time into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you’ll get clear data from a realistic prototype. The sprint gives you a superpower: You can fast-forward into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.

Create your own “Sprint” innovation lab

On Monday, you’ll map out the problem and pick an important place to focus. On Tuesday, you’ll sketch competing solutions on paper. On Wednesday, you’ll make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into a testable hypothesis. On Thursday, you’ll hammer out a high-fidelity prototype. And on Friday, you’ll test it with real live humans.

Set the Stage

Before the sprint begins, you’ll need to have the right challenge and the right team. You’ll also need time and space to conduct your sprint.

Monday: What’s the Problem?

Monday’s structured discussions create a path for the sprint week. In the morning, you’ll start at the end and agree to a long-term goal. Next, you’ll make a map of the challenge. In the afternoon, you’ll ask the experts at your company to share what they know. Finally, you’ll pick a target: an ambitious but manageable piece of the problem that you can solve in one week.

Tuesday: Sketch your ideas

After a full day of understanding the problem and choosing a target for your sprint, on Tuesday, you get to focus on solutions. The day starts with inspiration: a review of existing ideas to remix and improve. Then, in the afternoon, each person will sketch, following a four-step process that emphasizes critical thinking over artistry. You’ll also begin planning Friday’s customer test by recruiting customers that fit your target profile.

Wednesday: Choose the best

By Wednesday morning, you and your team will have a stack of solutions. That’s great, but it’s also a problem. You can’t prototype and test them all—you need one solid plan. In the morning, you’ll critique each solution, and decide which ones have the best chance of achieving your long-term goal. Then, in the afternoon, you’ll take the winning scenes from your sketches and weave them into a storyboard: a step-by-step plan for your prototype.

Thursday: Build a prototype

On Wednesday, you and your team created a storyboard. On Thursday, you’ll adopt a “fake it” philosophy to turn that storyboard into a prototype. A realistic façade is all you need to test with customers, and here’s the best part: by focusing on the customer-facing surface of your product or service, you can finish your prototype in just one day. On Thursday, you’ll also make sure everything is ready for Friday’s test by confirming the schedule, reviewing the prototype, and writing an interview script.

Friday: Test with customers

Your sprint began with a big challenge, an excellent team—and not much else. By Friday, you’ve created promising solutions, chosen the best, and built a realistic prototype. That alone would make for an impressively productive week. But you’ll take it one step further as you interview customers and learn by watching them react to your prototype. This test makes the entire sprint worthwhile: At the end of the day, you’ll know how far you have to go, and you’ll know just what to do next.

In many ways Google Sprints are very similar to the Deep Dive methodology which was originally pioneered by design firm IDEO led by David and Tom Kelley. They continue to pursue the methodology, in particular with a user-centric focus. Most famous was their “Shopping Cart” challenge of almost 20 years, a video of which has become folklore in the innovation world.

Here’s an extract from The Guardian reviewing the Sprint methodology:

Jake Knapp’s book has been a hugely valuable resource. It maps out, in minute detail, the steps needed to run a successful design sprint: gathering the participants together for the week and ensuring they’re free from other responsibilities; setting aside a space for the team to work together in for the week; and hour-by-hour activities to get from kicking off on Monday morning to wrapping up on Friday afternoon.

But really, a design sprint boils down to the following parts:

  1. Framing the problem to solve
  2. Generating ideas for solving the problem
  3. Deciding what to prototype
  4. Creating prototypes
  5. Testing prototypes with users
  6. Analysing the test findings

And as long as you can cram each of these parts into a week, however you can, you have a design sprint. (Of sorts, anyway.)

When my newly-formed team ran our first design sprint back in April, we already had a problem to solve, and lots of ideas for how to solve it. Some core members of the team also had other commitments that needed attention, and we didn’t have a space set aside to work in.

So we didn’t even attempt to officially call it a ‘design sprint’, or clear everyone’s calendars for official design sprint activities for the week. We simply set ourselves a deadline that we couldn’t back out of: we recruited some Guardian users to come into the UX lab on Thursday and Friday, so that those of us who were free would have no choice but to prototype something.

Then we improvised. We got together around a spare whiteboard in the corner of the office to decide what to prototype, and broke into two prototyping teams, with team members working at their desks. If people had other work on, that was fine, as long as our prototypes were ready by the deadline. Sure enough, we got it done, and ended the week with the whole team in the UX lab, watching their creations being tested and analysing the results.

Prototypes don’t need to be perfect, and you can make them in all sorts of ways

During a design sprint, the team creates prototypes designed to answer key questions with users at the end of the week. The prototypes need to do a good enough job of bringing the idea to life that you get useful feedback–but because it’s a sprint, you only have a day or two to get them done.

This means you need to get creative. Our whole team has been involved in prototyping, and because we’re not all designers, everyone has just had to use whatever method they’re most comfortable with for mocking up ideas quickly. So we’ve gone beyond the usual design and prototyping tools like Sketch, Marvel and Invision. We’ve had an editor create prototypes using the Guardian’s content management system, and a QA bring an idea to life via Keynote. Engineers have mocked up screens from scratch in HTML and CSS, and tweaked existing templates to hack together something almost working. A product manager has used Balsamiq, a wireframing tool.

Rather than prototyping a complicated user flow every time, we’ve also worked to cut down our prototypes to the minimum needed to bring the idea to life and answer our key questions. Sometimes our prototypes have consisted of a single screen showing an ad for a new feature. In our most recent design sprint, rather than prototype a whole user flow for a new app idea, we mocked up how it would look in the app store.

Our prototypes haven’t all been perfectly polished. They’ve rarely contained pixel-perfect design, or followed the Guardian’s brand and style guidelines, for example. But that’s okay for a design sprint. As long as each prototype communicates an idea clearly, you’ll learn a lot from it, and if users don’t respond well to it, it’s much easier to throw it away than a prototype you’ve spent ages on.

Most of all, it’s been valuable to have the whole team be able to gain experience of prototyping–I’d take this over perfectly-polished prototypes any day.

It’s okay to make a bunch of prototypes

Google’s design sprint method sees the team create one or two prototypes over the course of a week. But it was always going to be difficult for our team to limit ourselves to one or two. When we ran our first design sprint, we were at the ‘go wide’ stage, with lots of big ideas for solving the problem. So rather than honing in on one or two ideas, we were interested in getting feedback on lots of big ideas quickly to find the ones worth pursuing.

Plus, with so many great ideas floating around, and so many members of the team excited to be involved in prototyping, it seemed a shame to limit our prototype output to just one or two.

We ended up with four prototypes to show users at the end of our first design sprint; in subsequent sprints, we’ve shown as many as six. At first, we were worried about overwhelming users by showing them too many prototypes in one session. But it’s worked out fine. Our prototypes have generally been simple enough that they’ve been easy to show people–for the most part, users haven’t seemed overwhelmed, and we’ve gotten genuine reactions.

Best of all, we’ve learned way more than we would have otherwise. After each of our design sprints, we’ve had a better sense of which ideas to take forward into live tests on the Guardian site or app–and sometimes the best thing to take forward hasn’t been one single prototype, but the best bits of a few different prototypes.

Creativity is the act of turning new and imaginative ideas into reality.

Creativity is characterised by the ability to perceive the world in new ways, to find hidden patterns, to make connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena, and to generate solutions. Creativity involves two processes: thinking, and producing.

Creativity is the process of bringing something new into being. Creativity requires passion and commitment. It brings to our awareness what was previously hidden and points to new life. “The experience is one of heightened consciousness: ecstasy” says Rollo May in The Courage to Create.

Creativity is perhaps the most crucial factor for future success. To challenge the present. To imagine the future. To add value to commodities, and machines, and artificial intelligence. To engage people. To be human. To progress.

IBM’s Global CEO Study stated: “The effects of rising complexity calls for CEOs and their teams to lead with bold creativity, connect with customers in imaginative ways and design their operations for speed and flexibility to position their organizations for twenty-first century success.”

A 2012 Adobe study on creativity shows 8 in 10 people feel that unlocking creativity is critical to economic growth and nearly two-thirds of respondents feel creativity is valuable to society, yet a striking minority, only 1 in 4 people, believe they are living up to their own creative potential.

So what can we learn from some of the world’s most creative people?

David Kelley, designer … says build your “creative confidence”

Creativity is not a domain of only a chosen few, according to David Kelley founder of the world’s top design firm IDEO. And it shouldn’t be something that’s divided between “creatives” versus “practical” people. Telling stories from his legendary design career and his own life, he offers ways to build confidence to create.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author … says keep learning from success and failure

Author Elizabeth Gilbert was once an “unpublished diner waitress”, devastated by rejection letters. And yet, in the wake of the success of her best-selling book Eat, Pray, Love, she found herself identifying strongly with her former self. With beautiful insight, Gilbert reflects on why success can be as disorienting as failure and offers a simple, though hard, way to carry on, regardless of outcomes.

Carlos Cruz-Diez, artist … says keep learning and evolving your art

Carlos Cruz-Diez is a world-renowned artist and one of the greatest living figures in kinetic and op art. He creates interactive, immersive works that invite viewers to reconsider how they perceive the world – and at 94 years old, he continues to evolve as an artist, employing the newest digital technology in his Paris atelier, where he works with his children, his grandchildren, and a team of craftspeople who help bring his ideas to life.

Maya Penn, entrepreneur … says it is about being responsible.

Maya Penn started her first company when she was just eight years old, and thinks deeply about how to be responsible both to her customers and to the planet. She shares her story, and some animations, and some designs, and some infectious energy, in this charming talk. Hopefully, it will inspire you to launch your own business, find a different career path or start a fun side project.

Dustin Yellin, artist … says follow your own path, your own ideas

Dustin Yellin makes mesmerising artwork that tells complex, myth-inspired stories. How did he develop his style? In this disarming talk, he shares the journey of an artist, starting from age eight, and his idiosyncratic way of thinking and seeing. Follow the path that leads him up to his latest major work, and be inspired by his journey so far.

Boniface Mwangi, photographer … says it is the search for why

Photographer Boniface Mwangi wanted to protest against corruption in his home country of Kenya. So he made a plan: he and some friends would stand up and heckle during a public mass meeting. But when the moment came… he stood alone. What happened next, he says, showed him who he truly was. As he says, “There are two most powerful days in your life. The day you are born, and the day you discover why.” Be warned, there are graphic images in the following talk.

Taika Waititi, film director … says it is about expressing ideas better

Taika Waititi is a visual artist, actor, writer and film director hailing from New Zealand. His short film Two Cars, One Night was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. Taika’s second feature, Boy, appeared at the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals in 2010 and, more recently, his Hunt for the Wilderpeople enjoyed huge global success. In this classic TED Talk, he discusses how creativity has helped him to express his ideas and led him to where he is today.

Creativity in business

Some people say creativity has nothing to do with innovation— that innovation is a discipline, implying that creativity is not. Wrong! Creativity is also a discipline and a crucial part of the innovation equation. There is no innovation without creativity. The key metric in both creativity and innovation is value creation.

We are living in the age of creativity.

Daniel Pink in his book, A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future defines Economic Development as:

  • Agriculture Age (farmers)
  • Industrial Age (factory workers)
  • Information Age (knowledge workers)
  • Conceptual Age (creators and empathizers)

Pink argues that left-brain linear, analytical computer-like thinking is being replaced by right-brain empathy, inventiveness, and understanding as skills most needed by business. In other words, creativity gives you a competitive advantage by adding value to your service or product and differentiating your business from the competition. Without creativity, you are doomed to compete in commodity hell.

Creativity begins with a foundation of knowledge, learning a discipline, and mastering a way of thinking. You can learn to be creative by experimenting, exploring, questioning assumptions, using imagination and synthesing information. Learning to be creative is akin to learning a sport. It requires practice to develop the right muscles and a supportive environment in which to flourish.

Richard Branson has a mantra that runs through the DNA of Virgin companies. The mantra is A-B-C-D. (Always Be Connecting the Dots). Creativity is a practice, and if you practice using these five discovery skills every day, you will develop your skills in creativity and innovation.

Clay Christensen explores creativity in his book The Innovators DNA. Your ability to generate innovative ideas is not merely a function of the mind, but also a function of five key behaviours that optimize your brain for discovery:

  1. Associating: drawing connections between questions, problems, or ideas from unrelated fields
  2. Questioning: posing queries that challenge common wisdom
  3. Observing: scrutinizing the behavior of customers, suppliers, and competitors to identify new ways of doing things
  4. Networking: meeting people with different ideas and perspectives
  5. Experimenting: constructing interactive experiences and provoking unorthodox responses to see what insights emerge

Fast Company has just published the 50 Most Creative People in Business 2018.

Franz von Holzhausen, Chief Designer, Tesla Motors

When Franz joined Tesla in 2008, the electric-car startup was so inexperienced at vehicle design that it had to outsource most of the work on its original Roadster to the sports-car manufacturer Lotus. Today, its growing product lineup reflects the stylish minimalism of von Holzhausen, a veteran of GM, Mazda, and Volkswagen. “We want to show that an electric vehicle can be better than anything,” he says. “Not just better than a normal road car, but better than any supercar.”

Reese Witherspoon, Founder, Hello Sunshine

She turned Gone Girl and Wild into breakout films and followed them up with HBO’s Big Little Lies, sweeping nearly every category for which it was nominated at the 2017 Emmys. Her instinct for what women want is now being tested on multiple platforms through her pioneering 18-month-old company, Hello Sunshine. Witherspoon and her team are developing a slew of shows and films – with Apple TV, Hulu, NBC, TriStar/Sony Pictures, and more – while also building a direct-to-consumer brand through a fast-growing and influential book club, Facebook and YouTube videos, audiobooks, podcasts, and newsletters.

Chris Jaffe, VP of Product Innovation, Netflix

Netflix’s army of subscribers—125 million and counting—drive the investor confidence that saw the company’s stock rise 60% in the first four months of this year. And it’s Chris Jaffe’s task to get those folks to click on, and enjoy, enough TV shows and movies that they’ll stick around. As the company prepares to roll out 80 original movies in 2018, here’s how Jaffe is adapting user experience and playing matchmaker to keep engagement high.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6pLoswWbJg

Gianna Puerini, VP for Amazon Go, Amazon

Amazon earned its e-commerce bona fides more than 20 years ago by reducing the checkout process to a single click. The company’s new Amazon Go store, in downtown Seattle, represents a similar revolution. Gianna Puerini has redesigned the neighborhood grocery as a cashier-free experience. People queued up around the block when Go opened in January. Amazon is reportedly planning to open up to six more this year, and the “just walk out” concept has already been cloned in China.

“We are working on reinventing brand building as we know it. The world is in a state of massive disruption—changing consumers, use of data and digital technology, development in AI, just to name a few. So, the best way to handle these disruptive forces is to lead disruption. That’s why we’re rethinking media, advertising, our agency partners, and our roles as marketers. We are reimagining and re-engineering across the entire marketing ecosystem to lead the way into the future, because in many ways, it’s already here.”

P&G’s Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard recently described a huge range of ways in which the world’s biggest consumer goods company is boldly embracing sustainability to transform its operations, rethink its brands, drive innovation, form new partnerships, make a positive impact across its footprint, and lead by example in its drive to be “a force for a good and a force for growth.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzFyXjXbkY4

“What if P&G products were made in a way that recycles waste, water, and energy?” he pondered, before adding “Actually, We’re already doing it, with 85% of our production plants sending zero manufacturing waste to landfill and finding uses for 5 million tons of trash.”

He argued that business paradigms must evolve in order to put people and the planet first. That means thinking differently about growth – growing the market vs. focusing on market share – and brands.

As part of its new Ambition 2030 sustainability plan, P&G has pledged to make all its packaging fully recyclable or reusable by that year. It also plans to power its manufacturing facilities with 100% renewable energy by 2030, and send none (as in zero percent) of its consumer and manufacturing waste to landfills—all part of the ambitious goals that it details in its latest corporate sustainability report.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFoGujfLUr0

P&G is advancing sustainability through learning from and working with partners, such as participating in #BrandsForGood, a new coalition committed to unleashing the advertising power of brands to make sustainable lifestyles desirable among consumers. It’s a significant commitment by the world’s biggest advertiser, which spends more than $7 billion annually to drive more than $65 billion in sales.

The new vision has spurred innovations such as the world’s first recyclable shampoo bottle made from ocean or beach plastic, as P&G introduced with its Head & Shoulders brand and has extended to its Herbal Essences shampoo and its Fairy dish detergent brands.

It’s also bringing sustainability-driven innovation to its flagship Tide brand. High performing surfactants in development could mean even better cold-water cleaning—and reduced household energy usage by encouraging eco-friendly consumer habits.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS6bJwZ0Kdk

The Ambition 2030 new sustainability frameworkincludes two specific packaging goals: that 100% of packaging will be recyclable or reusable and that it will find solutions so that no P&G packaging will find its way to the world’s oceans. At the local level, that includes converting 25% of its shampoo bottles in Europe to post-consumer recycled plastic, a move that could prevent 2,600 tons of plastic annually (equivalent to 17 blue whales) from becoming ocean waste.

P&G is also launching new products or updating existing products with plant-based ingredients, such as Gain Botanicals and Downy Nature Blends. In another proof point that it’s making a difference, its Tide Purclean laundry detergent was named 2018 product of the year by Environmental Leader for being plant-based, dye-free and made from 100% renewable energy while being “just as powerful as regular Tide.”

How do you see your future?

We live in an incredible time.  More change in the next 10 years than in the last 250 years. New technologies transforming the ways in which we live and work. Digital platforms and blockchains, AI and robotics, 3D printing and nanotech .

These are just some of the fantastic new capabilities that enable us to innovate beyond what we can even imagine today. The future isn’t like the future used to be. We cannot just evolve or extrapolate the past. Today’s future is discontinuous, disruptive, different.

It is imagination that will move us forwards … unlocking the technological possibilities, applying them to real problems and opportunities, to drive innovation and growth in every industry, in every part of our lives.

Imagine a world where you press “print” to get the dress of your dreams, the food of your fantasies, or the spare parts for your car. Instantly, personalised and on demand. Think then what does that mean if we don’t need the huge scale of manufacturing plants, warehousing and transportation. Maybe we will even subscribe to the IP catalogues of brands, in the ways we currently subscribe to Netflix.

Innovation starts from the “future back”

The best place to start is the future. The best entrepreneurs think “future back” rather than just trying to move forwards with the limitations and distractions of today. Elon Musk grabs headlines with his bold “Humans on Mars by 2025” vision, but then that makes everything else more purposeful, and more possible. Tesla to Hyperloop to SpaceX, all seem more possible, and even stepping stones to a greater destination.

“Future back” thinking also means you are not limited by your own capabilities. Richard Branson had a fantastic vision for a better airline, a consumer bank, a space travel business. But no idea how to make them happen. But then he found partners who could help make them happen. Partners with the expertise on tap, to connect with his ideas, and together innovate further and faster.

Partnerships are key to the future, connecting ideas and capabilities, risks and rewards, to achieve more together.

What might the future look like, and how will it affect you?

Predicting the future is a fun game, but also a series challenge for every business today. What might the future market look like, therefore which are the smartest choices of today?

Jumping to the future, we see dramatic change. For example, by 2050 ,the global population is likely to hit its highest point, then slowly reduce. By 2045, the much discussed “singularity” will be reached, where some machines have greater intelligence than humans. By 2040, a federated world government could be established, working with nations and tribes. And by 2035, a human population is likely to be established on Mars, perhaps by Chinese-owned SpaceX.

The World in 2030

By 2030 the average person in the U.S. will have 4.5 packages a week delivered with flying drones. They will travel 40% of the time in a driverless car, use a 3D printer to print hyper-individualized meals, and will spend most of their leisure time on an activity that hasn’t been invented yet. The world will have seen over 2 billion jobs disappear, with most coming back in different forms in different industries, with over 50% structured as freelance projects rather than full-time jobs.

Over 50% of today’s Fortune 500 companies will have disappeared, over 50% of traditional colleges will have collapsed, and India will have overtaken China as the most populous country in the world. Most people will have stopped taking pills in favor of a new device that causes the body to manufacture it’s own cures.

Here are 33 dramatic predictions by a range of the worlds think tanks and futurists:

  • By 2030 over 80% of all doctor visits will have been replaced by automated exams.
  • By 2030 over 90% of all restaurants will use some form of a 3D food printer in their meal preparations.
  • By 2030 over 10% of all global financial transactions will be conducted through Bitcoin or Bitcoin-like crypto currencies.
  • By 2030 we will seen a growing number of highways designated as driverless-vehicle only.
  • By 2030, a Chinese company will become the first to enter the space tourism industry by establishing regular flights to their space hotel.
  • By 2030, the world’s largest Internet company will be in the education business, and it will be a company we have not heard of yet.
  • By 2030 over 20% of all new construction will be “printed” buildings.
  • By 2030 over 2 billion jobs will have disappeared, freeing up talent for many new fledgling industries.
  • By 2030 a new protest group will have emerged that holds anti-cloning rallies, demonstrating against the creation of “soul-less humans.”
  • By 2030 we will see the first city to harvest 100% of its water supply from the atmosphere.
  • By 2030 world religions will make a resurgence, with communities of faith growing by nearly 50% over what they are today.
  • By 2030 over 50% of all traditional colleges will collapse, paving the way for an entire new education industry to emerge.
  • By 2030 we will see a surge of Micro Colleges spring to life, each requiring less than 6 months of training and apprenticeship to switch professions.
  • By 2030 scientists will have perfected an active cross-species communication system, enabling some species to talk to each other as well as humans.
  • By 2030 we will see the first hurricane stopped by human intervention.
  • By 2030 we will see wireless power used to light up invisible light bulbs in the middle of a room.
  • By 2030 we will see the first demonstration of a technology to control gravity, reducing the pull of gravity on an object by as much as 50%.
  • By 2030 democracy will be viewed as inferior form of government.
  • By 2030 traditional police forces will be largely automated out of existence with less than 50% of current staffing levels on active duty.
  • By 2030 over 90% of all libraries will offer premium services as part of their business model.
  • By 2030 forest fires will have been reduced to less than 5% of the number today with the use of infrared drone monitoring systems.
  • By 2030 over 30% of all cities in the U.S. will operate their electric utilities as micro grids.
  • By 2030 we will have seen a number of global elections with the intent of creating a new global mandate, forcing world leaders to take notice.
  • By 2030 traditional pharmaceuticals will be replaced by hyper-individualized medicines that are manufactured at the time they are ordered.
  • By 2030 we will have seen the revival of the first mated pair of an extinct species.
  • By 2030 swarms of micro flying drones – swarmbots – will be demonstrated to assemble themselves as a type of personal clothing, serving as a reconfigurable fashion statement.
  • By 2030 marijuana will be legalized in all 50 states in the U.S. and half of all foreign countries.
  • By 2030 cable television will no longer exist. By 2030 a small number of companies will begin calculating their labor costs with something called “synaptical currency.”
  • By 2030 it will be common to use next generation search engines to search the physical world.
  • By 2030 basic computer programming will be considered a core skill required in over 20% of all jobs.
  • By 2030 we will have seen multiple attempts to send a probe to the center of the earth.
  • By 2030 a form of tube transportation, inspired by Hyperloop and ET3, will be well on its way to becoming the world’s largest infrastructure project.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVL-VKqdVkA

Counting back down through the next 10 years, the possibilities become ever more real, more predictable and influenceable:

2029

  • Cars now fully automated, with rapid decline in personal ownership
  • City of Bangkok requires huge new sea wall due rising oceans
  • USA is now only fifth largest economic nation

2028

  • Scientists rebirth dinosaurs from fossil DNA
  • Tesla is world’s largest subscription-based mobility operator
  • Realtime health-tracking of all citizens by World Health Organisation

2027

  • Brainwave control, for security and identification
  • 3d-printing of all human organs is now standard
  • Majority of world’s population are now vegetarian

2026

  • Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia is completed after 145 years
  • Cure for Alzeimer’s Disease launched and made available free to all
  • E-payments dominate as most countries end use of physical money

2025

  • Tracking technologies now implanted in most humans
  • Human brain simulations and back-ups
  • Saudi Arabian mission to Mars is launched, followed by China.

2024

  • Vertical farming takes off, particularly in Middle East
  • DNA profiling now standard in most countries
  • Production of carbon-fueled engines ends

2023

  • Commercial asteroid mining is launched
  • Online voting is now standard in all countries
  • Micro-protein (insect-based) foods become popular

2022

  • India becomes the world’s largest population
  • China wins FiFA World Cup in Qatar
  • Germany closes its last nuclear power plant

2021

  • China’s tallest building is over 1km
  • First manned mission lands on an asteroid
  • Hyperloop launched Mumbai and Hyderabad

2020

  • World Expo in Dubai, including launch of world learning platform
  • Human memory and conversation stored
  • High resolution bionic eyes

Shaping the future to your advantage

By jumping to the future, and then working backwards, you develop a bolder, braver ambition. Shaping the future on your terms, exploring the new possibilities for innovation and growth, unlimited by the priorities and prejudices of today. New technologies will be key, but they are more the enablers than answers. How will they make life better? How will they make your business better?

Inspired by the Adidas Speedfactory, what does the future of your manufacturing look like? If Amazon’s Alexa can manage your home, then what could the future workplace look like? What would happen if phones were free like Jio Phone has just disruptively done in India? How could you apply big data like 23&Me in healthcare to predict what people want? Or the new business models like Airbnb and Nespresso to redefine markets? Beyond the hype of Bitcoin, how could blockchain redefine how you engage customers? And what actually will people want most in the future?

Futurists look for emerging patterns – signals of future possibilities, already out there. Emergent behaviours, adaptive usage, new aspirations. You just need to find these signals, and apply them. Maybe on the fringes of your market, or by transferring ideas from other sectors, or other geograhies, or others aspects of life.

Leonardo da Vinci definined innovation as making unusual connections. So how could you connect the most relevant and disruptive ideas together in new ways?

Are you ready to create your better future?

It’s time to jump to the future. And then look back. Then you will see today differently.

Too many of us get locked in to a mindset of today – of incremental, extrapolating, and perfecting the old world. Working backwards from 2025 you will define different milestones, different priorities to be achieved within 3 years, and even next year.

Innovation demands a future mindset, that will deliver bigger ideas to drive innovation and growth, and new perspectives on what matters most today.

Are you ready?

More useful future links

Brands are the most powerful platforms to accelerate growth.

A great example of this is Ferrari, which launched itself on the NYSE two years ago with an $11 billion IPO. Whilst the business certainly has a great heritage, founded by motor racing driver Enzo Ferrari in 1929, it is not fast cars that investors are interested in. It is the brand.

Ferrari only sold 1699 cars last year, generating $600m revenue and $70m profit.  Therefore a business valuation 150 times larger than annual profits must have an incredibly powerful asset, that can unlock future growth. Yes the brand, and in particular the opportunity to shift its meaning from fast cars, to luxury lifestyle.

However most business leaders don’t really understand brands, dismissing them as superficial or fixed assets. And most brand marketers don’t focus on the strategic opportunities for brand-centred business growth. Yet be it the innovation of new products and services around in an existing market, or through brand extensions into adjacent categories and geographies, either directly or through licensing-type models, the brand can take your business further and faster, at less risk and less cost.

“Brand innovation” is therefore about rethinking brands and marketing in fast-changing environments. It is about innovating the brand concept – what it stands for, like in the Ferrari case, where redefining it around lifestyle rather than cars gives it a much broader and emotional platform to grow – and also the innovation of brand-related products, services, channels, business models, experiences and more.

The best ideas for brand innovation typically come from customer insights and inspirations from other brands. It is about learning from the best ideas of the world’s leading brands – developing new insights and ideas to rethink, refocus and reenergise your brand in today’s markets.

What can you learn from Airbnb to Burberry, RedBull and Tesla to innovate your own brand’s future? 

Here are 12 steps to brand innovation, grouped into three parts – the first about the ambition (Dare to Dream), the second about the solution (Innovate and Inspire), and the third about the experience (Engage and Enable).  We chose one leading brand to illustrate each of the 12 steps, together creating a roadmap for accelerated growth:

Part 1: Dare to Dream

Brands with purpose and ambition, shaping markets in your own vision

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7ZnXo-kfNQ

Step 1: Disruptive vision … The Tesla Way 

  • New insights and inspiration … The vision of Elon Musk, making electric cars sexy, direct retail to the Supercharger network, Hyperloops and Powerwalls.
  • Practical ideas and applications … How to develop a more disruptive vision of your changing markets, and to win by designing the future on your terms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHO-hiTQs_Y

Step 2: Obsessive focus … The Apple Way

  • New insights and inspiration … We all know the story of Apple, but how does it continue to innovate after Steve Jobs, and build its brand?
  • Practical ideas and applications … How to apply ruthless focus and simplicity to your best ideas, in a way that shapes markets and inspires humanity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvZjFhYg-Zk

Step 3: Deeper insight … The Airbnb Way 

  • New insights and inspiration … From renting out air beds, to more rooms than Hilton Hotels, how to build a trusted platform that brings people together.
  • Practical ideas and applications … How to make sense of changing consumer behaviours, connect people in new ways, and win in the sharing economy.

Step 4: Iconic meaning … The Red Bull Way

  • New insights and inspiration … adrenalin-fuelled Red Bull is much more than a drink – it became a media company, building its brand beyond mere products.
  • Practical ideas and applications … How to make develop practical ways to build brands beyond products, to engage people in bigger ideas.

Part 2: Innovate and Inspire

Brands harnessing tech and humanity to innovate business models and experiences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5th14pSe5_Y

Step 5: Parallel worlds … The Umpqua Way

  • New insights and inspiration … the bank inspired by Starbucks and Gap, redesigning everything from products to service, language and interiors.
  • Practical ideas and applications … How to learn from the experiences of your own consumers in parallel sectors, to find new ideas that already work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIxVXwpTx2w

Step 6: Experiential design … The Burberry Way

  • New insights and inspiration … from classic logo to iconic experience, engaging audiences more deeply by fusing digital and physical across multi-channels.
  • Practical ideas and applications … rethink your physical and digital brand experience to be more participative and personal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZzpuprg6ms

 Step 7: Crowd participation… The Threadless Way

  • New insights and inspiration … Crowdsourcing, co-creation and competitions to create the coolest t-shorts in the world, and sell more every month.
  • Practical ideas and applications … Embracing collaboration to build your brand with your consumers, by them and about them, building loyalty and advocacy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l9x59ibKEQ

Step 8: Building communities … The Nike Way 

  • New insights and inspiration … from a waffle-inspired vision, to doing more for everyone with Nike Considered to Nike+, Rockstar Workouts and Fitness Club
  • Practical ideas and applications … how to build communities that go beyond social media, enabling people to do more together.

Part 3: Engage and Enable

Brands engaging people in the best stories, and delivering experiences that do more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKRuJ3AdfC0

Step 9: Creative storytelling … The Mercedes Benz Way 

  • New insights and inspiration … Mercedes Benz set up an in-house agency, to drive better stories faster and further.
  • Practical ideas and applications … How to rethink brand communication in an always-on, real-time world of distracted and discerning consumers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8ZR4Gu5F8M

Step 10: Liquid content … The Coca Cola Way

  • New insights and inspiration … Learn from Coke’s “liquid and linked” brand communications, staying fresh with will.i.am and Ekocycle.
  • Practical ideas and applications … How redefine brands as stories, that are relevant, flexible and evolving – and the role of marketers as storytellers

Step 11: Empathetic delivery … The Starbucks Way 

  • New insights and inspiration … Learn from Starbucks Reserve, and how big brand keep innovating – pouring one cup at a time, Moby Dick lives on
  • Practical ideas and applications … exploreing how brands stay connected to the world – caring, responsible and doing more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwiEqtqIoHg

 Step 12: Fast growth … The Rapha Way

  • New insights and inspiration … Cycling Clubs for lycra-clad enthusiasts, drinking coffee and talking about tours, with Paul Smith and Team Sky.
  • Practical ideas and applications … Building brand experiences and communities around real people, to drive and sustain fast growth.

12 steps to innovating your brand, and innovating your business through your brand. 12 examples of great brands who have reached sought to innovate in different ways. And even more powerfully, an illustration of how you could start to connect the innovations of different brands together.

Brand innovation is available now as a three-day executive workshop, and also as a depth facilitated innovation project to develop your brand in new ways that accelerate profitability and growth. Recent clients include Cartier and Coty, RedBull and P&G

Email peterfisk@peterfisk.com

We live in an incredible time. More change in the next 10 years than in the last 250 years.

New technologies are transforming the ways in which we live and work. Technologies enable incredible change. It is how we unlock their potential that matters.

The most innovative businesses see the world differently.

They don’t just seek to imitate the success of others, to compete in the markets of today, to frame themselves by their relative differences to competitors. Instead they play their own game.

I call them “gamechangers”, and have spent the last 24 months running competitions around the world, to find and rank the world’s most innovative companies by sector and geography.

So what’s the “game”? Well, in simple terms, it’s the market.

These companies go beyond innovating their products and services, their customer experienes and business models. They seek to innovate how their markets work.

Think of it like a sports game. How could you change the game? It could be anything from the pitch dimensions to rules of play, the team composition to the measures of success, the role of the referee to the participation of fans. Even the name of the game.

Now look at today’s most disruptive innovators – 23andMe to Airbnb, Brewdog to Buzzfeed, Casper to Coursera – they reframe, reimagine and redefine the market on their terms – who is it for, why people buy, what they pay and get, and how they work.

So who are Norway’s potential “gamechangers”? And how will they reshape both domestic and global markets in which they are focused?

Aker BioMarine … harvesting krill, the superfood from Antarctica

Itera … the communication business “taking giant leaps”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTPqRs9LIGg

Kahoot! … the game-based learning platform, now in over 180 countries

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlXpKHH5kh0

Norwegian Airlines … redefining long-haul low-cost air travel

Schibsted … international media group in 29 markets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maR141F4zpg

DNV GL … the world’s largest classification society

OneCall … making telecoms cheap and easy

Komplett … e-commerce company with nine webshops

Stormberg … innovative outdoor sports retailer

More of my recent blogs, insights and ideas:

And a bit more from me:

  • Explore my 7 books, including my new book Gamechangers. 
  • Watch my latest videos, keynote speeches and interviews.
  • Get inspired by 100 case studies, shaking up markets right now.
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  • Read my latest blog updates, insights and ideas to inspire your thinking.
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