Since the 1960s the words of Nobel prize-winning songwriter Bob Dylan – ‘The times they are a-changing’ – have consistently rung true as society, politics, business and culture experience rapid development and transformation. If anything, as we survey the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the times are changing at a faster pace than ever before, as the third and fourth industrial revolutions, fuelled by technological advances and globalization, are changing our way of life and our planet in ways that are arguably more fundamental than at any time in history.
In this book you will find 100 innovations that are changing how we work, how we interact with others, how we learn new skills, travel the planet, save the planet, do business, and teach the next generation to innovate further. Some of these innovations are already well under way, while others hint at the future to come. All the ideas and projects described here are real and designed to inspire. They will give you a glimpse of the future and aim to provoke questioning, ignite fresh thinking and catalyse progress. Drawn from more than 30 countries, the innovations have come from a range of sources, from big corporations that are thinking differently to please their shareholders, to social entrepreneurs whose calling is to disrupt for the good of all.
At Springwise, the world’s largest idea-spotting network (springwise.com), we have been spotting and publishing the most interesting innovations since 2002. We do this via our unique and trusted community of over 20,000 global ‘Springspotters’ in around 190 countries, who power our network. These Springspotters supply us with around 100 innovative ideas for review every single day. We write up the best of these for publication on our website and newsletter, where they are tagged and sorted by industry, demography and business model. We are therefore privileged to have an early view of some of these changes.
Our mission is to spot the innovators, the entrepreneurs, the original thinkers, the disrupters and the outliers from across the developed and developing world and to bring these new ideas to a wide readership. You may already be aware of some of them. We survey the most innovative thinking to help you navigate the future. We also care deeply about positive change. In a world that is so often a maelstrom of conflict and confusion, great innovation and invention have never had a greater role to play in ensuring our wellbeing and survival. Applying this belief internally, we are proud members of 1% for the Planet (onepercentfortheplanet.org) and will donate 1 per cent of our share of the sales from this book to environmental causes.
Deciding which innovations to include here has been no easy task. We have tried to cover a broad range of ideas, while promoting a global perspective and citing many businesses from outside the mainstream Western media. We have also striven to strike a balance between technology-driven innovation and more ‘lo-fi’ creative thinking. Many of our favourite ideas are those that seem to mock more hi-tech examples with delightfully simple solutions created on a shoestring. One other aspect of the Springwise lens is to ensure that we provide robust coverage of the increasing number of social innovations we see. It is often easy to be obsessed with tech and Silicon Valley, but at the heart of the Springwise purpose – and, indeed, fundamental to a balanced world – are innovations that improve people’s lives.
We also consider whether the innovation has been published widely, since part of our mission is to bring our ideas to our readers before they are seen elsewhere. This is more of a challenge in a book, of course. Our website is dynamic and updated daily, but you will see that many of the ideas in this book are carried through the website, with the latest, evolved innovation iterations relating to each of our chapter themes.
As for what defines an innovation itself, we’re very clear:
An innovation is a new solution to a problem. A Springwise Innovation can be digital or analogue, capitalist or social, start-up or corporate, academic or institutional, developed from an old model or creating a new one. Above all, it will be different, an outlier, part of the Zeitgeist.
As on our website, the innovations featured here have all been arranged according to their industry or niche into chapters, to help you dive straight into specific areas of interest for a quick dose of inspiration. Within each chapter are ten innovations each representing the major themes and evolutions discussed in the chapter introduction, while the takeaways will encourage you to think about how these developments could affect your own practice or business.
Of course, separating these innovations out into discrete chapters in this way is also problematic. If each idea featured were written on a strip of paper and thrown on the floor and we were tasked with sorting the pieces into a logical order, it’s likely that most of us would set about creating something more closely resembling a web. To understand the innovations fully, it is best to see them as existing in an interconnected network of ideas, informing and signposting both the history and the future for ideas in other chapters. All the ideas here are in a discourse with one another, and we’d encourage you to read the book with this thought at the back of your mind. Not only will it, we hope, make the book more enjoyable, but it will also reflect the fact that the innovators we write about do not think in narrow terms. On the contrary, the greatest breakthroughs come from thinking outside the metaphorical box and allowing your mind to open up to all possibilities, to wander towards the most unpredictable and brave solutions.
As you read through the book, either from start to finish or by dipping in and out, the way the innovations knit together will become clear and you will start to see themes emerging. We’d encourage you to make links not only between innovations within the book but to your own business as well. And while some of the innovations – particularly those using the latest technologies – may seem prohibitively expensive, remember that it is usually still possible to adapt the idea, if not the delivery. For example, you will read about Mexico City’s online Plataforma Constitución CDMX, which invited citizens to help shape the city’s new constitution. This use of technology has implications for how we think about city management, citizenship and even democracy.
We have seen the same idea adapted and reborn in retail, with online surveys asking customers to vote on a company’s products and thereby help shape that company’s decisions. The fashion retailer C&A found a way to bring customers’ Facebook approval into full view in its real-world stores in Brazil. The company posted photos of clothing items it was selling on a dedicated Facebook page, where it invited customers to ‘like’ the ones that appealed to them. Meanwhile, the brick-and-mortar stores displayed the votes on screens in real time, giving in-store shoppers a clear indication of each item’s online popularity.
A year later, fashion retailer Nordstrom made dedicated areas of their bricks-and-mortar stores designated Pinterest sections, which included some of the most pinned products from the Nordstrom Pinterest page that week. The programme took into account the top items on a regional basis, meaning that products promoted in one store might not be the same as in another store, reflecting local preferences. At the time of the scheme, the Nordstrom Pinterest page had nearly 4.5 million followers, making the pinned items a fair bellwether for trends — and at a fraction of the cost of C&A’s initiative.
Another great example comes from S-Oil. The South Korean petroleum provider’s ‘Here’ campaign chose a simple solution to one of the biggest problems faced in modern cities: finding a parking space. Hi-tech solutions to the issue include Germany’s ParkTag app, which uses smartphone-enabled crowdsourcing to create a map of free parking spots to be shared among friends. But S-Oil sought a solution not reliant on smartphones or sensor systems, and joined with Korea-based advertising agency Cheil to tackle the issue – with balloons. Bright yellow arrow-shaped balloons were placed in the middle of parking bays, tethered to the ground by a piece of string. The arrows were boldly emblazoned with the word ‘HERE’, to indicate a free space. When a car drove into the spot, the string was pulled under the vehicle, drawing the balloon down. When it left, the balloon floated back up again, instantly alerting those nearby that the space was being vacated.
Both the Nordstrom and S-Oil campaigns show that innovation need not be expensive or lean on the latest technologies for delivery. By embracing this mindset, every innovation in this book can be seen not as an end point but as an inspiration.
Because the innovation landscape is a web, predicting where it will go next is fraught with difficulty. With so many variable components, and with technological advancements often relying on success in other fields to progress, ‘future-gazing’ is a far from straightforward task. When we first wrote about Facebook back in 2006, it wasn’t the first social network we had covered, and few could have predicted the exact magnitude of its success today. That was also the year we first began discussing virtual-reality innovations, but it was not until devices such as the Oculus Rift or even Google Cardboard entered development that VR innovations started gaining significant traction. Many of the innovations we covered back then would arguably have fared far better if released now, largely because of external developments. Political, social and cultural changes all have an impact, and are impossible to reliably predict. But, in uncertain economic and political times, future-gazing is also a necessary undertaking, regardless of how many caveats must be placed.
The effects of automation on the workforce are discussed in more detail in the Workplace chapter, and there can be little doubt that historical advancements in automation have led to fewer ‘top-end’ factory jobs. In the USA, for example, it’s notable that employment in jobs that consist of routine operations, which are easily automated, has been largely stagnant since the 1980s, while employment in non-routine jobs has grown. The result is that there are fewer ‘top-end’ factory jobs compared to the total job base. As artificial intelligence (AI) evolves further and is capable of more human-like levels of complexity, it is likely to start encroaching upon these non-routine employment figures as well.
But this is hardly the first time that workers have been adversely affected by advances in technology. In The Economic Singularity (2016) by Calum Chace, the author begins by discussing workers’ historical reactions to mechanization. In the fifteenth century, Dutch workers attacked textile looms by hurling wooden shoes — called sabots — into the machinery, giving us the origin of the word ‘saboteur’. Later, during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, Luddism was a (relatively) small but noisy movement that destroyed the new machines that were displacing workers. From 1811 to 1813, death threats signed ‘King Ludd’ were sent to machine owners, and the government reacted in kind by making ‘machine breaking’ a capital offence.
But the Luddites were not reacting against mechanization or machines per se. However painful the circumstances, few people believe that technological advancements that remove repetition from the workplace should be stemmed, and even fewer believe that it can be. Rather, the Luddites were reacting not so much against the machines themselves as the workers’ inability to share in the prosperity that those machines brought.
To look again at the present day, most estimates put the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI) at around 2045. At this point, AI would be as capable as a human in all areas of cognition, which, debatably, would leave humans nowhere else to move up the employment value chain. Over the coming years, the impact of automation on the workforce is only going to grow and we see examples of this ongoing revolution every day at Springwise and all around us, as companies learn to work in the new way.
But the answer to the dilemma is to innovate more, and to disrupt further – to seek out models that accommodate these changes and mitigate the negative side effects. Technological advancements cannot and should not be slowed, but the systems around them can be disrupted to ensure that they bring shared prosperity. There is already plenty of inspiration to be drawn from many of the sharing economy and open-source models featured in this book.
We live in remarkable times, and in Disrupt! you will find 100 extraordinary and inspiring innovations to help you and your collaborators, friends and family innovate for a positive future.
James Bidwell