The past couple of decades all innovation efforts and application of technology has been in an effort to increase the efficiency of people working in organisations. This could be done by automation and helping people work more productively, still working on what they were already working on.
I believe that the future application of technology and human ingenuity would be to increase the effectiveness of people and machines. This will mean that we are looking at complete rethinking and redesign of processes and how work is done and even what work is done.
New technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence, advanced robotics, internet-of-things, large-scale 3D printing, hyper-personalisation and social trends like the sharing economy and digital natives becoming the dominant generation in the workforce will all lead to a situation where, businesses will be forced to rethink what they do and how they do it.
In this economy, the abilities that every business will be looking for is the ability to reimagined business processes (imagination & creativity) in a way without breaking existing business and yet arrive at the next iteration of business (Designing and running micro experiments and using the data generated from them to change something very specific in the business & iterate).
In a way, this will redefine everything in our world – right from how we build/consume products, to how we provide services like education and healthcare. I would go as far as to say that this will change how we govern ourselves as a race or nation as well.
So, what does this mean to all of us?
We need to be not only ready for change but initiate it in every walk of our lives. We should start learning and flexing our creative muscles, rediscover the power of our imagination from our childhood, learn and understand new technologies.
We need to bring our inner consumer to work and think about how we would want to be treated and let that guide the work that we do.
