Did you know that FOMO has been around since the 16th century?
Back in 1525, Erasmus, among many others, opined that due to the printing press, that there were just too many books to read — that one could never read all of the books out there in one’s lifetime.
I’ve worked with a number of clients over the years who seem to have a bit of a self-esteem issue. We have very successful ideation sessions, a number of great ideas are generated, but then when it comes to taking the best of the best of these ideas and turning them into reality, they get cold feet. The phrase I hear a lot of is “We’re not like Google, we don’t have unlimited funds to spend on crazy, out-of-the-box moonshots.” It’s lucky for you then, that you don’t need unlimited funds to drive innovative new products and services out of your organization.
One of the key things that I’ve seen is that is quite common among truly innovative new ideas is that they can sometimes make people feel uncomfortable. This discomfort ranges from a mild creepiness all the way to outrage and pure hatred, leading to protests and lobbying for you to be shut down (see Uber, almost anywhere there is a strong taxi union, colluding with the city government).
Futurists are usually right, at the wrong time. The thing about true innovation, is almost everything is an expansion on an older idea. It isn’t until time and technology converge at that perfect moment that great ideas are executed. Ideas tend to spark well before the execution due to lack or resources, namely practicality.
Ever wonder why when you have a spare moment, no matter where you are, whether it’s waiting in line, at a stoplight at an intersection, or at the coffee shop, you pull out your phone and check your feed. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Facebook feed, a Twitter feed, a Snapchat feed, or News feed that you are subscribed to.
I worked at Yahoo from 2004 through 2009. During my tenure, we ran three major programs, an enterprise-wide innovation program, which generated near-term products and services, a futurist program which crowdsourced both future strategy and future focused patentable ideas, and a targeted IP development program, which focused on developing targeted, potentially patentable ideas, with an eye to expanding the patent portfolio. We were so successful in these endeavors that those last two above led to substantial contributions to a patent portfolio which was recently valued at over $1B.
We’re going to talk a little bit about something that recently been covered in the news right around the time of the election and want to talk about it as it may be an interesting opportunity for those of you out there who are looking for some new type of startup opportunity to really dig into. I am not sure how much of a problem this is (IMHO, it seems to depend a lot on which side of the “aisle” you are on) but let’s talk about it anyway and see if we can deconstruct some opportunities in this space.
About an hour ago, I finished writing an article for thinkfuture pulse and pressed schedule to schedule it for tomorrow at 6 am my time, the normal time I publish. As I was writing the post, I thought to myself – is this my best work? I kept writing and writing and writing, reworking and reworking it, asking myself over and over again – is this my best work – does it bring my readers any value? Even as I was thinking that and writing that,
I’ve been through a lot of economic ups and downs in the Bay Area and it’s always been very interesting to me the way things work around here; it’s a very unique place. The weather is great, never too hot never too cold. The amount of people who are here who are just amazing blows my mind. There are a lot of places that aspire to be like it: Silicon Alley, Silicon Prairie or Silicon Beach or Startup Paradise (I think that’s the Hawaiian one – which is probably more accurate since very few of these startups have anything to do with Silicon)
I look forward every year to the new stuff coming out of Google’s, Apple’s and Facebook’s conferences with a lot of interest as they are supposed to represent new, cutting edge innovation that these companies should be known for. That all of these companies are leaders and not fast followers, companies who simply allow others to break new ground, then stepping in and improving things.