“Innovation distinguishes a leader from a catch-up” — Steve Jobs
How to make the world transparent? This important objective is pursued by many organizations and institutions across the globe. Before going any further, it’s important to learn the definition of this concept.
What Is Transparency?
Transparency in a company or a region can be defined as the overall ease of the movement of funds, people, objects, transactions, etc. It means that a high level of transparency means low friction in conducting relevant activities.
Silicon Valley is a great example because of its high density of venture capitalists, innovative companies, research institutions, talented entrepreneurs, and all kinds of efficient networking activities.
The Concept of the Transparent World
The transparent world is a future development of many innovative systems for collaborative work of people located in many countries. Although Silicon Valley was one of the most obvious examples in the past, professionals located in any part of the world can take part in this kind of collaboration these days, including Turkey, Japan, Russia, India, Brazil and so on.
The greatest benefit is that there are no boundaries. With the development of the modern technologies, they keep vanishing. Even speaking the same language is no longer important, technology allows people to actively communicate and cooperate.
For many centuries, people have been driven to make the entire world more transparent through the invention of trains, wagons, roads, boats, the radio, airplanes, TV, phones, the Internet, etc. Thanks to the impact of these innovations, the modern world is brought together and has greater transparency.
The Impact of Modern Cities
Nowadays, many great cities are based on trade and keep developing in terms of high transparency levels. Their growth and development prove the power of transparency in different forms, including the following:
- Finance;
- Communications;
- Logistics;
- Speech;
- Government;
- Commerce.
Besides, cities are the spots with a number of innovations that arise on a regular basis.
The Internet
The development of the Internet is a huge step forward as it provides all people with a unique ability to connect with others instantly and access the knowledge database. But today’s access and bandwidth are still limited for most of the globe. Other challenges that users have to face include the following:
- Poor web accessibility, especially in the rural regions;
- Low resolution of video teleconferencing;
- Good search still remains quite primitive (even Google is far from being perfect);
- The ocean of knowledge is quite deep and there’s a plethora of fish there, but only some succeed to be caught by the current-day angling rods.
Many of the above-mentioned problems concerning the Internet are being solved every day.
The Emergence of New Knowledge
The most valuable part of today’s systems is not some particular idea that underpins them, but rather a creative combination of many ideas. The definition of any innovation is the creation of the new knowledge that has its sustaining value for the society. As noted by Peter Drucker,
“the main characteristic of all knowledge-based innovations is that they’re almost never based on a single factor, but on a combination of different knowledge types. It’s interesting that not all of them can be technological or scientific”.
Putting together different knowledge forms in some surprising and new ways is something that creates important innovations. That’s why the emergence of cities plays a big role. As they develop and become more diverse, the competitive forces and opportunities that drive a convergence of a variety of knowledge forms keep increasing.
Artificial Intelligence
The modern artificial-intelligence tools used to make connections between valuable ideas resemble hand tools. However, the society needs industrial-power tools. The good news is that the latest advances in machine learning start showing people what is possible.
For example, everyone remembers how a small team of five people won a prize of $ 100,000 in a competition held by Kaggle. The participants were given two months’ worth of information on airplane flights and were asked to come up with a new way of optimizing airplane routs. The teams were working on classical TSP (traveling salesman problem), that mathematicians have worked on for centuries. The winning team has exceeded all expectations and came up with a model that was 40% more efficient than any other modern systems. Even a part of this potential will translate into billions of dollars saved on an annual basis.
This innovation is quite impressive given that it’s linked to one of the most well-researched problems in mathematics. It’s amazing that it took only two months for a small team to create such a valuable advance only because they decided to tackle it in a totally new direction.
What exactly did they do? They utilized the power of merging different knowledge systems in the process of innovating. The team won $100,000 but more importantly for them, the entire world now knows that they are machine-learning superstars. Their value skyrocketed only because they succeeded to prove that their team could add an extraordinary value to the modern society. They are an inspiration for other teams who are striving to come up with innovative solutions despite the complexity of the problems or the small number of participants.
Their experience also shows that being in different locations does not pose any problem as the transparent world is where we all create in.
How Other Technical Limitations Are Addressed
The above-mentioned technical limitations are also addressed rapidly in the transparent world. Over the next few decades almost all the world’s population will have adequate Internet and phone access, teleconferencing will be in 3-D with 4-K or more resolution, and intelligent computer assistants, like Siri, will increasingly exhibit savant-like abilities. Based on many experiments and tests, virtual trips can feel as real as physical traveling thanks to a high level of vividness.
The Future of Computer Systems
Computer systems, such as Siri, will become will become word mavens, insightful financial analysts, and superb mathematicians. Such helpful services as simultaneous translation in foreign languages, creating future agendas, and a real-time analysis of meetings will become standard practices.
Advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence systems will gather and analyze information in real time. They will also synthesize data and identify the best opportunities to create new knowledge for the society.
Online collaboration systems will bring all of these advances together to facilitate the value creation. Nowadays, people can use different sophisticated systems that enable their asynchronous and synchronous collaboration. Other online services facilitate finding the best experts in specific fields, and they can be either subtracted or added to a team when needed.
The above-mentioned innovations won’t be limited only to algorithm advances. Think about the developments in virtual supply chains, 3D printing, and real-time delivery by autonomous vehicles and drones. They all will make it possible for international teams to create, design, and deliver products all over the world.
Some people consider these predictions to be restrained. According to Ray Kurzweil, we’ll be able to connect our brains to computers in a matter of decades. High-bandwidth interfaces will enable us to have an computerized extension of ourselves, to be a human-computer hybrid, if you will.
“Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking,”
he says. This means that though we’ll retain our biological self, our thinking processes will be mediated through and enhanced by technology. This will lead to a substantial increase in mental capacity and yet another era of innovation.
Signal-to-Noise Problem Detection
It’s possible to think of transparency as a specific signal-to-noise problem detection. Would-be innovators are trying to find those faint “signals” in a background filled with “noise” that will allow the creation of new innovations. It’s all about connecting the existing information and unmet needs to create innovations or new knowledge. The entire society should collaborate to make signals easier to find thanks to special signal “amplifiers” and remove different of “noise” and “attenuators” sources.
What are the signals? These are different changes in demographics, government regulations, consumer preferences, technologies, and natural resources.
Amplifiers are transparent institutions, people, knowledge clusters, advanced communication systems, effective infrastructure, legal and networking organizations, abundant natural resources, high education levels, positive incentives, and so on.
Attenuators are all kinds of legal restrictions, inappropriate taxes or regulations, monopolies, inefficient management practices, prejudice, discrimination, time-consuming approval processes, the labor laws that favor only specific groups, etc.
Noise stands for national security threats, financial instability, political favoritism, corruption, high crime levels, tax or regulatory uncertainty, legal ambiguities, and much more.
Creating Innovations
Most people can see individual changes in, for example, a specific technology. However, valuable innovators always look for excellent opportunities that arise from multiple changes. They also consider how they should come together to address specific societal demands. Where others see challenges, innovators see opportunities. At least, that’s the case with Silicon Valley with its “colliding exponentials” and ever-rising performance. Any combination of different knowledge forms creates important innovations.
The ability to synthesize and benefit from different forms of existing knowledge to create surprising innovations is the essence of the transparent world.
Creating surprising innovations is a difficult process, and that’s why the society should do everything possible to make it easier. Transparency allows innovators to detect the existing signals. Hong Kong has until recently been a model of economic transparency. Silicon Valley is an exemplar today. Going forward global teams will create their own virtual ecosystems that embrace such advantages.
Most of the elements that determine transparency are either influenced or controlled by the government. They should be constantly working to improve it. For the same reasons, the main threat comes from destructive government regulations.
Bottom Line
Fast-emerging developments imply specific conclusions:
• The modern world becomes more transparent, thus, increasing a rate of innovations and the intensity of competition;
• In most markets, there will be only a few leading winners in every category.
Transparency matters a lot for future innovations. The flight-planning competition organized by Kaggle is one of the examples of how the modern world keeps adapting to the global innovation market. Going forward success will require assembling the finest teams wherever they reside, using the best value-creation practices, and leveraging the most powerful infrastructure and collaboration tools.
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