Welcome to the fifth wave
Simone Dedda & Luciano Manuali from H-FARM Consultancy
“We are at an inflection point and we’ve been here before. Innovation isn’t a straight line and every new wave of innovation has been followed by skepticism and doubt. It happened 4 times before: first it was the era of mainframes, the second wave brought a PC into our homes, the third wave connected us to the Internet while the fourth wave introduced us to the smartphone, a supercomputer in our pockets.”
“It’s difficult to see a revolution when you are in the middle of it, but in ten years, when we will look back to today, it might go a little bit like this: Internet of things, blockchain, Artificial Intelligence. We are at an inflection point and if you look, you can already see what it is about to happen. Let’s look at the challenges and the opportunities we might get. Together we can define the next step: welcome to the fifth wave.”
With these words, we started our attendance to
Conference 2018 together with other 15,000 innovators, startuppers, geeks, and nerds. 18 themed tracks of content unfolding in a venue located in the middle of the Amsterdam Oosterpark brought us to better understand what we have to care about when facing a new wave of innovation.Learn how to use a microwave oven to cook, not how to build one
The first lesson we learned came from
(Chief Decision Scientist at Google) in Machine Learners track. She pointed out that the real value of technology doesn’t lie in the technology itself, but rather in its application and support to strategic decisions. Too many times we fall in love with technology and not with the solutions it provides.(Technical Evangelist at Microsoft), built on top of that by distinguishing the job of a machine from the human touch: humans are bad at elaborating data (we don’t even know what to watch on TV because there are too many shows) so we have to reduce problems and questions to data problems, that are the ones best solved by machines.
P2P = Power To People
Under the umbrella of the “Power to People” slogan, we can put the two other main topics of the conference: blockchain and the
startup contest.Blockchain was the buzzword of the event.
Bryce Bladon (co-founder of
Power to people means also to look after people, especially the ones who are homeless, or refugees, or who have physical disabilities, and our environment: that was the focus of the finalist startups of the Chivas Venture contest.
In a crescendo of emotions, the 5 startups pitched their ideas: Braibook wants to build a device to make every digital document readable by blind people; The Picha Project aims to give jobs to refugees by setting up decentralized canteens for companies; Mestic transforms cow manure into bio textiles, Change: Water Labs is developing a low-cost, waterless toilet for non-sewered households and communities; Change Please (the winner) is a coffee company helping the homeless off the streets.
From this experience we learned a new way of approaching problems, a way to deal with the uncertainty that we will face in the years ahead. We also had the opportunity to experience first-hand the tech trends of the “fifth wave”, out of our offices and daily routines.
