Last week’s debate, which Epoch co-hosted with Spiked and Big Potatoes, was titled ‘Beyond the iPad: what IT and telecoms could do for innovation, productivity and the economy’. An ambitious question, but one that our speakers tackled with enthusiasm, taking in seventeenth century ships, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and why teenage sons prefer the medium of text for communicating unwelcome news along the way.
An overriding preoccupation with several of the speakers was technology’s failure to deliver on the promises of forty years ago: when man walked on the moon in 1969 it was sold as merely a beginning to a Star Trek styled existence in space. Yet the futuristic yearnings of Generation X have not been realised, argued Alan Patrick, Broadsight co-founder and member of The Big Potatoes. Alan argued that ‘innovation takes longer than you’d expect’, and this, coupled with monopolies held by the likes of Google and Apple, has slowed the creative economy. Peter Cochrane, technology pundit and founder of Cochrane Associates, and himself a devoted investor of innovative new projects, argued that it is only a paucity of imagination that limits innovation.
As you’d expect, JP Rangaswami, BT’s chief scientist, was rhapsodic on the theme of innovation, although careful to point out that ‘an invention is something new; an innovation is something old being done in a new way’. Like Alan, JP argued that innovation is the best way to break up established monopolies and disrupt the IT industry. After suggesting that the twentieth century was the age of biology, and the twenty-first century the age of physics, JP posited a future which will bring back the biological, human element to IT, creating platforms that rely on the concept of a social collective and injecting a much-needed warmth into technology.
Matt Warman, consumer technology editor for the Daily Telegraph, argued that it is economics, not a lack of imagination, which hinders innovation. Pointing somewhat ruefully to the newspaper industry, Matt brought the discussion round to the Times’ new paywall, introduced in an attempt to monetise online content. This is one of many endeavours to create a viable economic model for online news, and as Matt argued, innovation will always struggle to survive without a robust business case to support it. Facebook and Twitter are closer to the mark, as they collect user data for advertisers and create revenue from personal information. Yet the frisson this generates as users realise that ‘private’ information is considered fair game in an online world still holds back the process. Matt’s conclusion was that it is the process of making money from innovations, not the technology, which holds us back from breakthroughs.
While the causes hindering innovation were well-discussed, the process of nurturing and encouraging innovation where not neglected in consequence. The example of seventeenth century ships’ logs was used as an example of how weather data collected by ship captains has helped modern scientists plot climate change, and how social collectives can create valuable open platforms and share data to foster innovation. As JP illustrated, the technology to do many things is there – but teenage sons will often prefer a text to a phone call when explaining why they will be five hours late to dinner... and the consensus was that to see innovation as the simple product of technology alone was too naive a picture: the landscape must incorporate investment, a business model, and an understanding of the social mores that govern how we consume technology.