Heard@ Update10: The Final Episode Of Infonomia's Innovation Series

Yesterday in the Aribau Cinema in Barcelona, more than 600 people gathered for Update 10, Infonomia’s bi-annual conference keeping pace with innovation and forward progress worldwide. In 300 slides, Alfons Cornella and Antonella Borglia presented a synthesis of their insights and discovered the newest and most powerful trends of the last 6 months. Alfons focused mostly on technology and economic changes that may disrupt the way we work and live. Antonella was more concerned with social entrepreneurship, anthropology, philanthropy and the civil perspective.

In total, they presented 10 topics, including problem resolution, peer-to-peer consumption, and emerging technologies. Many of these trends and information you may already be familiar with because of the buzz they have created, such as nano technology, the sharing economy, health & safety gadgets, low cost robotics, a focus on specialization and finding your niche. But it is nice to have some examples and see the state in which current developments exist. What’s really amazing is the speed at which concepts are transforming from a pilot to full-blown implementation. The distance between science fiction and reality becomes smaller every day.

Take Nano (10 ^-9m), used in cloths, materials, medicine and food, but what does it actually do? This movie of Ultra-ever dry makes you see the difference. The innovation curve is exponentially accelerating into light speed, providing completely new opportunities with technology we were unable to experience yesterday.

Update 10 was presented as a “show and tell” using hundreds of pictures and examples of bleeding edge innovation. Companies from all over the world were shown with their innovative products, and hence, a lot of links were given. Scroll down t0 get inspired and see just a few of the links presented.

A big trend is peer-to-peer consumption: the celebration of the inventor and the sharing economy. In the sharearchy of collaborative consumption, the ultimate option is to buy. But there are so many alternatives, like borrow, swap, share, repair. In an essence, we move to a status of living with less, and doing more with the things we have. We are part of the RE-generation. Our aims are RE-duce/ RE-cycle/ RE-pare/ RE-invent. A warning to the corporates: the consumer is taking back their market by collaborative actions! A few examples:

Drive now service/ Lyft (alternative for taxi’s and delivery services).
Freecycle.org keeping good stuff out of landfills (alternative for buying new things)
Taskrabbit (crowdsourcing errands and a site becoming an alternative for an HR agency and/or consulting firms)
Lendingclub/ puddle (C2C lending as an alternative for banks)
onefinestay / casa particulares (alternatives for hotels and restaurants)

Every now and then hands went up in the audience. Not for questions…there was no time for questions and Alfons and Antonella spoke at the speed of the Concorde. Rather hands went up to take pictures of the slides that made them laugh or wonder about the implication of these new advancements in technology and society. It is natural to wonder or even become enthralled with questions like; ‘how will I deal with this change?’ and ‘how can this improve my daily life or business?’

If you want to learn more, here is some suggested food for thought:
– Are you solving the right problems?
– Book: Running Lean from Ash Maurya
– Book: Where good ideas come (the natural history of innovation) from by Steven Johnsen
– Site: inventables.com showing a new material each week .
– Book: The Nature of Technology by W. Brian Arthur

This was the 10^th and the last edition of Update. Infonomia is going to reinvent itself. A first glimpse of their new project VERNE: Tools to innovate/ A new method to interact.

Looking into the future, upcoming events in Barcelona co-organized by Infonomia/ Co-Society that you might want to check out for yourself:

– 2/3 July Ideas Meets Markets
– 13/14 July Radical Benasque

So what is new out there? The links:

1. Future: Problems to be solved, inefficiencies to be reduced.

qminderapp.com: Helps you wait in line without wasting your time. Why stand in line if you can have a virtual one.
Shrink to Fit: Living large in tiny rooms. More and more singe people living on their own. Living Alone- Going Solo. Smartspace.net/ ecospacestudios.es
Factum-arte.com Turning art into physical products through digital mediation
Finding/ exploring minerals; talvivaara.com/ reb-gold.com
What can be found all around the world, the C: coffee , coke and cigarettes and car parts. These car parts can be reused for new products, e.g. an incubator.

2. Emerging technologies will change our experiences

Materials; flexible molded LEDs, transparent Aluminum a complete new experience in the airplane: watching the clouds all the time, no more window seats.
Revolution of graphite production
health safety ; cardio.com , smart skin; mc10inc.com. There are gadgets that can call you and warn you for a heart attack in 4 hours.
3D printing combined with bio-printing: organovo.com : working on a printed hand

3. Manufacturing 3.0; Find your niche and become world leader in it
orona.es
treski.no
stglass.co.jp
rodemic.com
axis.com
flyuav.co.uk

4. The Next Big Thing/ Trends:

Future jobs: Data scientists. Future education: Science, either physics or chemistry
Smart/ Intelligent: Self-driving car with zero emissions and proactive digital interaction: My computer- My friend
Energy: Ultra efficient solar energy.

romotive.com envisionsolar.com
firstsolar.com
iter.org
betterplace.com
libelium.com
breakoutlabs.org
getpebble.com
siri.com
twist.com
layar.com