The end of disruption

The end of disruption

The 2020s will be about sifting through the disruptions of the 2010s.

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Incremental is the new disruptive

The 2010s were about big, earth-shattering, game-changing disruptions. However, the 2020s could bring about the next phase in innovation, one focused on incremental, rather than disruptive, innovation. After transitions to the cloud, artificial intelligence initiatives, and every Gartner Hype Cycle technology you can name, this year, expect to see incremental innovations built out over evolving iterations of product and services. This is when operationalizing begins, and we anticipate seeing, feeling, experiencing these ideas more broadly.

Along the lines of innovation, we’re considering how organizations can ensure health care innovations succeed, learning about the coolest and most impactful medical innovations of 2019, and wondering if the ’20s will be the decade of the battery.

We hope you’ve been enjoying this newsletter and would love any feedback (erica@nycmedialab.org). Thank you again for reading!

Best,
Erica Matsumoto
NYC Media Lab

What do we mean by incremental innovation? Incremental innovation is characterized by a series of small, gradual improvements upon existing products and services. In contrast to disruptive innovation, which tends to change people’s lives permanently and create new benchmarks and rules (e.g., how the jet plane’s invention set a new benchmark for air travel speed, distance covered, and convenience), the immediate impact of incremental innovation isn’t always clear — or even calculated — at launch.

The innovation matrix gives a good sense of where incremental innovation fits in relative to the three other types of innovation.

Source: Viima

In the coming year and beyond, numerous technologies are set to continue meaningfully improving through incremental innovation. Phone processors, non-quantum computer processors, toaster ovens, screen technology, and much of everyday life will see continued incremental innovations in 2020.

Faster, better, stronger… but slowly

Moore’s Law — the observation that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto an integrated circuit doubles about every 18 months — is expected to peter out some time in the early 2020s, when chips feature components only about 5 nanometers apart. In the leadup to this eventuality, it’s already beginning to become obvious that physical components in many commonplace technologies, namely computers and cell phones, have reached the point at which their future improvements will be incremental.

As Fast Company writer Mark Wilson observes, there used to be a time when upgrading to a new generation of phone meant getting access to critical features, such as internet browsing, legible photos, or the ability to open PDF attachments. However, nowadays, smartphones aren’t evolving much from one generation to the next. Sure, they’re still getting faster — but at a slower pace than before — and their form factors are being tweaked each time, but the changes are incremental, rather than disruptive.

Similarly, while the quantum computing revolution (see our previous issue on this) is coming down the line, Engadget senior writer Devindra Hardawar called Intel’s last few chip processor upgrades “incremental steps” in August 2019. With Moore’s Law set to slow down in the 2020s, it’s likely that this observation will generally hold true for chip updates going forward. While there will be the odd meaningful leap every few steps, it’s likely that computers — like cell phones — will see steady improvements, but nothing disruptive, over the coming year.

Everyday improvements

Incremental innovation is going to also continue improving mundane objects around us in 2020 and beyond. In our homes alone, there are just a few innovations that are already making life easier every day:

• Smart mugs that keep drinks warm
• Internet-connected toaster ovens that take the guesswork out of cooking
• Smart refrigerators with built-in cameras that allow customers to check on their fridge’s contents while at the grocery store, recommend recipes based on soon-to-expire food, automatically label items in the fridge using computer vision, and send updates when new items are added or old products are depleted.

Expect to see similar improvements across your daily life in 2020. Incremental improvements to everyday objects will continue, making life just a little better with each change.

How to Ensure Your Health Care Innovation Doesn’t Flop In an era of increased accountability for both the quality and cost of care, everyone in health care is chasing innovation. However, it’s often difficult to execute innovation in health care organizations. Four observations can help demystify innovation in health care:

1. Innovations are merely successfully scaled inventions
2. Innovation doesn’t necessarily require radical change
3. Radical innovation demands “choreography” across an organization in order to be effective
4. Improvement is sometimes better, and more appropriate, than innovation

7 min read ‘Man on the Moon’ moment — the year’s big breakthroughs 2019 saw numerous remarkable innovations in medicine, including:

• Reversing paralysis using a mind-controlled exoskeleton suit
• Keeping the brain alive after death with synthetic blood
• Inventing new ways to treat the previously untreatable via gene-silencing drugs that kill the genes responsible for causing diseases

Click through to read about more of the amazing and potentially life-altering medical breakthroughs that occurred at the end of the last decade. 9 min read The battery decade: How energy storage could revolutionize industries in the next 10 years A surge in lithium-ion battery production over the 2010s drove prices down to the point of making electric vehicles commercially viable from both cost and performance standpoints. In the coming decade, utility-scale battery storage will become available and play a key role in transitioning the world to a renewable-powered future. 12 min read This Week in Business History

January 1, 1939: The HP partnership is struck in a one-car garage at 367 Addison Avenue in Palo Alto, California

Bill Hewlett, 25, and Dave Packard, 26, make and sign an informal agreement and toss a coin to determine the order of names. Today, this building is designated “the birthplace of Silicon Valley.” It’s recognized as the beginning of innovation, chance-taking, and common-sense policies that made HP one of the first computer pioneers.

HP bought the property in 2000, after the garage was designated California Registered Landmark №976. The garage is also listed in the National Register of Historic Places, as listing 07000307.

Source: The Talkative Man





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