Last weekend I had the honor of giving the keynote address at Sacred Hearts’ 16th Annual Science Symposium. My speech focused on the technological advances we’ve seen over the last 2 decades and highlighted some of the innovative things we can expect 20 years from now.
Predicting the future is hard enough. But you can imagine how tough it was to come up with a funny yet g-rated opening joke for the several hundred parents, girls and school officials in attendance? (You can get the joke here: http://su.pr/2KUSHX. It worked!)
Your business, like mine, is volatile to change. Technological advances can undermine seemingly robust industries overnight.
As business owners, we must be vigilant about protecting market share and profit margins. At the same time, we have to be willing to introduce products and services which could cannibalize our cash cows. After all, if we don’t create the perfect competitor, our competitors certainly will.
With this unique mix of paranoia and opportunity, we must look towards the future and anticipate change:
- Attachments are so old school. Many of us are still send and receiving attachments. These range from Word files to PDFs. The world is rapidly moving toward ‘cloud’ computing. This means your applications and your files will be stored entirely online. The upside: You and your colleagues can collaborate real-time. All you need is internet access. Storage and security will be managed by the cloud provider.
- Computers will ultimately fix themselves. Remember the scene in The Iron Giant (wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Giant) , where the robot explodes into a gazillion pieces and then the pieces automatically crawl back to the epicenter so the robot can reassemble itself. At the very least, twenty years from now, computers will be simpler and less prone to failure. Either way, we can expect better yield and longer life spans. Think of your car or your fridge. The newer models are already full of computing techonologies, yet we consumers dont have to pay much attention to them. They work. Period.
- We can say goodbye to the mouse. The big thing at the recent Computer Electronics Show was natural interfaces. We currently use a mouse to command the standard desktop computer and we use the painfully inept TV remote to change channels. Future technology will do a better job of sensing or knowing the users intentions. This will be accomplished by reading gestures, eye movement and facial expressions.
- Display technological will go real. The ultimate goal is a picture so real and so lifelike it’s indistinguishable from reality. It will look 3 dimensional and emulate all the shading and lighting in the immediate surroundings. Education, medicine and – of course – entertainment, will benefit tremendously.
- Electronics will be biodegradable. The first manufacturer to successfully integrate green components will surely enjoy a windfall in business. The amount of e-waste we’re dumping into the ground will eventually reaching a tipping point, galvanizing the industry and policy makers to adopt environmentally friendly solutions.
But the best inventions need not be so complex. Often the most elegant solutions are the simplest. And sometimes the biggest problems we face, like diarrhea in the developing world, are easy to solve. I challenged the girls to create products like the Pee Poo bag (Peepoople.com) , for areas of the world where there’s poor sanitation. Or my favorite, the LifeStraw (LifeStraw.com), an inexpensive device which filters harmful bacteria from water, rendering even the Ala Wai safe to drink.
One of my favorite tenets: Companies do not destroy companies. Instead, companies destroy themselves. If we are to stay viable as a business, we must always keep a watchful eye on the horizon.








