Technology Empowers Innovation
February 3, 2009 by Raj Sheelvant
Executives in wired organizations need to have a sharper understanding of how technology empowers innovation, says Google’s chief economist Hal Varian. More than ten years into the widespread business adoption of the Web, some managers still fail to grasp the economic implications of cheap and ubiquitous information on and about their business according to Varian in an interview on McKinsey Quarterly titled ‘Hal Varian on how the Web challenges managers’.
Right now we are in the middle of “combinatorial innovation” period (a phrase that Hal Varian has coined). This means that we are in a period where Internet components like software, protocols, languages, and capabilities can be combined in ways that can create totally new innovations. This is going to make vast improvements in how industries function in the future – there is going to see lots of efficiency improvements in services, because of network capability.
Hal Varian also makes an interesting observation. He quotes psychologists Herb Simon “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Hence in the coming decade sexiest job is going to be that of statisticians. The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids.
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