Monday Morning Mojo

The Age of Innovation

Innovation across the planet started in slow waves that could be measured in millennia, spans of a thousand years. These waves have been speeding up. Take a look at this chart I made of some of civilization’s most far-reaching innovations:

200,000 - 150,000 BC	Hunting & Gathering
10,000 - 5,000 BC	Agriculture
1400 - 1700 AD	The Renaissance, printing press, patent law, gunpowder
1600 - 1800 AD	Closed field agriculture: mechanization, crop rotation, selective breeding & the resulting population explosion
1750 - 1850 AD	The Industrial Revolution and its impact on manufacturing, transportation, labor, interchangeable parts, petroleum, electrification, and mass production
1945 - present	The Atomic Age including nuclear power
1955 - present	The Jet Age makes global transportation accessible
1960s - present	The Computer Age including space travel, large scale computation capacity, integrated circuit technology and microprocessors, data mining, redistribution of income, and the rise of the knowledge worker
1990 - present	The Internet Age including the ubiquity of the World Wide Web, personal computers, smart phones, mass gaming, virtualization, practically unlimited storage, the cloud, and augmented realities

The last four ages are still in process. They are piling up on and interacting with each other. The resulting complex environment is often rife with turbulence, a good description of today’s business world.

At the same time this chaos regularly gives birth to new orders, new ways of organizing. With that come new capacities and opportunities. As a result we have entered an era of innovation.

Where is the next frontier? Take a look at the models in your head! Where can you bend the rules and create a new business model, a novel service, or a radical product?

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