That's a pretty foolish assumption. Look at the long view, innovation typically comes in fits and spurts, no predicting when the next will start or the current one will fade away.
Agreed. The assumption that after one innovation the next has to follow is the flaw. It was like this for the last maybe 100 years. But it doesn't mean that it keeps going on like that. For the longest part in history innovation was a rare thing. And at some point we reach the global cool down of the innovation S curve.
It won't; that is a naive view. Innovation can't keep accelerating forever, and I would be surprised if it even keeps up its current pace; far likelier it's a sigmoid curve - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function
"Frankly I do not see any other significant business innovation coming."
You have a severe lack of imagination. Consider that while there will be N business innovations in all, there will only be one that will be the last. So I'd say it's more likely there will be many more than no more.
Has anyone actually made a serious case that innovation has stopped? The closest I've ever seen are people asserting that things they feel are obvious in retrospect aren't innovations, but that's just a silly bias.
This is definitely a problem in our culture and the 'what's next' mentality can end up adding a lot of noise to innovation. New is exciting & fun for sure, but what's better for business and progress is something novel that is then flushed out over a relatively long term to become a successful business. Then the business is in a better place to make huge impact (see Apple...)
No it doesn't assume no innovation. It's based on the fact that wishing for a magical elixir which will replace our dwindling resources is just that - wishful thinking.
It's sort of a tautology. If innovation happens in a mature section, it creates something different so it's happening in a different field. If no innovation happens, well then it's still the same field. Next year he could be talking about the rapid rate of innovation in dumbed-down tablets.
This is my hunch as well. Innovation comes with built-in technical debt and it is often invisible at the time. Years later, when the inefficiencies are more apparent, those with the opportunity to start with a blank slate, can avoid many of those mistakes, and make something better.
Negative. Innovation is great. But new inventions won’t all be successful. And claiming one will because another invention was successful in the past is bad logic.
People who say we don't have innovation don't literally mean we have nothing new, they mean that the rate, scale or impact of innovation is much less than in preceding decades. This sentiment has been expressed outside of the tech world also: Larry Summers maintains that we are in a period of long term economic stagnation.
I don't know if the claims, as they relate to tech, are true; maybe someone should actually present some convincing evidence for it instead of vaguely pointing to Snapchat.
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