A Vision For The Future

Predicting the future is hard.

One of the reasons it’s hard is because we can only imagine the future by standing in the context of the present. While that sounds obvious, it’s easy to forget how technology can often surprise us.

I’m reminded of Jean-Marc Côtés futuristic pictures from France in the late 19th Century, depicting what the world would look like 100 years later, in the year 2000.

How would we get our mail delivered to us faster in the future?
We speed up the delivery man by giving him a flying vehicle.

Not too far fetched when we consider delivery drones, but the point is that visonaries of that time had no concept of (e)mail digitally transmitted via a globally connected network.

How about this one:

Music without the need for musicians meant replacing the orchestra with mechanically controlled instruments. There was no concept of keyboards that could sample realistic orchestra sounds.

Here is an interesting one, what will the future classroom be like?

How about the transmission of knowledge from books directly into the minds of students.

You can view more of these 19th Century pictures here

The point of course is while we can start to imagine emerging technologies based on what we can do today, it is much harder to predict technology 100 years into the future. We will inevitably encounter paradigm shifts in technology that will change our thinking.

So how do we successfully innovate for the future?

We think small.

Future thinking is fun when predicting the possibilities far off into the future (that’s what makes science fiction such a great genre), but more often real innovation in technology is the everyday small accomplishments.

Minimal Viable Innovation

A minimal viable product or MVP is the idea of creating the simplest possible version of a product for the purpose of getting feedback. A minimal viable innovation (MVI) follows the same philosophy by idealizing small achievements towards a larger goal.

For example, an MVI on Virtual Reality may focus on the following:

• How do we make the headsets smaller and less bulky.
• How do we improve the sound quality.
• How can we stabilize the movements to reduce motion sickness or nausea.

Small and targeted solutions make a huge impact on the success of a technology. For example, Apple didn’t invent the personal computer, it just made it better one feature at a time. The race towards the best smart phone includes matching the current feature trends, and adding one or more ‘must have’ features.

In applying MVI in our own workplaces, we can look to make small improvements. Whether it’s a workflow step, a process change, a product detail, etc… Small changes will cumulatively lead to larger shifts.

For innovative success, we don’t need deep future thinking, perhaps we just need incremental future thinking.

Innovation begins by what is possible, and evolves towards the impossible.