Search Results

Long-term changes in the world such as demographic trends, climate change, and disruptive innovation create permanent shifts in patterns of supply or demand. Chapter 12 explores the nature and effects of these kinds of disruptions, which create a “new normal” rather than a short-term shock that quickly reverts to the old normal. The chapter suggests methods for attending to and even benefiting from these long-term changes.

Based on the practical experiences of a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, this chapter responds to ideas presented in this section concerning disruptive health innovation and privacy. Using case studies in the development of health-related and non-health consumer products, the text describes how common attitudes about the primacy of professional health expertise retards innovation, and argues that true disruption must come from outside the formal medical establishment. The text also describes why product-level privacy controls for users, while important, may provide little actual value and therefore involve difficult tradeoffs for developers—a lot of effort for functionality that is demanded but unlikely to be used or useful.

This chapter explores why innovation of meaning is relevant for businesses. Why it is a major differentiator. How does innovation of meaning create business value? Why is it relevant in current competition? And especially when is it relevant? What are the contextual drivers that lead to new meaning? When it is likely to occur? (I.e., when is it likely that in an industry a new vision succeeds, hopefully proposed by you rather than by a competitor?) This is due to two converging phenomena. On the one hand customers search for it (see above). On the other hand, only a few organizations know how to do it effectively. Firms have become extremely productive in generating ideas of solutions, especially thanks to the web and to creative methods such as design thinking. But the more ideas they create, the more they see a confused landscape in which they struggle to find a meaningful direction. In a way, the success and diffusion of problem solving is one of the major causes of its own loss of relevance, and of the prominence of innovation of meaning. Ideas are abundant. Meanings are rare. And value, in business, is in what’s rare.

Israel Ruiz, Executive Vice President and Treasurer of MIT, starts this dialogue by outlining the model and mechanisms used by MIT, as an institution, to maintain its leadership in disruptive innovation through an economically sustainable process. He goes on to explain the MIT model for the replacement of professors, a dynamic process, which is combined with encouraging the maximum exchange of innovation between bodies and research centers from inside MIT and external ones, keeping the focus on a key idea for the institution: the flexibility of space and ideas aimed at connecting people. Later, he relates how they deal with the continuous influx of new talent on a large scale, while maintaining the peer-to-peer philosophy. He then talks about the way in which MIT assumes the critical opinion of external sources, which assess how the institution is operating, and also discusses how creative freedom is upheld as a nexus in the long term by ensuring that MIT members get time to create; this comprises part of their economic plan. Finally, he outlines how educational and learning practices are renewed by combining face-to-face teaching with their global online project.