Here’s How The Next Big Thing Really Happens
A blueprint for discovering the technologies of the future and bringing them to market
It often seems easy to know when the next big thing is upon us. Someone like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk stands on stage and tells us what they are planning to launch. The business press gets excited, pundits swoon and a thousand imitators are created. Before long an ecosystem develops and the worlds is forever changed.
In reality though, things are much murkier than that. Innovation is a process of discovery, engineering and transformation and it is only the last part that is visible to most of us. The seeds of a revolution start long before, in obscure labs and at conferences with high priests presenting papers written in arcane vernacular.
Since the 1950s, the engine that’s driven new knowledge to, as Vannevar Bush put it, turn the wheels of private and public enterprise,” has been the federal government. Still, the process of moving new discoveries out of government labs and into the marketplace has been slow and cumbersome, but a new model holds promise for greatly accelerating breakthrough innovation.
