Innovation for Good: Reflections on the 2020 Fast Company Innovation Festival
By moving its five-day NYC-based conference on technology, leadership and design online for 2020, Fast Company itself has shown what most of its innovation leaders have said at this month’s FC Festival on Demand: The current COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated innovation and sparked more internal and cross-industry collaboration.
By providing a single digital event platform for its multi-session experience that convened thousands of makers and innovators from across the globe for inspiration, connection and thoughtful takeaways, FastCo mirrored what companies and innovators around the world are doing — and what dMASS has built a business on — making invisible connections tangible.
At dMASS, we track and curate innovation and, by leveraging the world’s intelligence with proprietary AI, we prove that innovation is neither mysterious nor unpredictable. As we’ve written before, tracking patterns and trends that cut across industries gives us insight into disruptive innovations before they become disruptive. And our power to bridge industries empower our clients to bring innovations from an outside industry into their own. In tracking and curating innovations with the potential to save energy, material and water, we know that many innovations don’t have stated life-promoting or sustainability missions attached to them; but in looking at the system they’re connected to, you see they do have potential for significant impact. One presenter, Andrew Ibrahim, a surgeon and healthcare researcher with a unique understanding of architecture and design, captured the importance of thinking in systems when he shared his perspective on the topic of Designing a Better Future After COVID-19: “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.” For good or for ill. And design, he says, can make a difference.
In the case of Ibrahim, the mission is outright life-saving. When he started treating COVID-19 patients, he noticed imperfections in the system — the size of patient rooms, the inability to communicate easily or comfortably, the loneliness of the patient experience. His realization: Hacks like allowing patients and their healthcare team to communicate via mobile phone made the exchange of info efficient and eased stress. Another realization: The building that’s designed for world class care is stifling. As a healthcare worker with a design mind, he has decided to make available a two-year fellowship for urban planners, architects or designers to create a highly quantitative system that measures how to measure if design ideas achieve what they set out to achieve. His plan is to make rooms more useful, design more expansive and connections more possible under stress. In healthcare delivery design as in housing design, the objective is to measure equity — design something in several different ways and measure the outcomes. “To give designers a platform and enhance the quality of what we do,” he says. “It’s quantifying design.” It also aims to make design inspiring, encouraging and community-minded.
Outside of healthcare, design systems thinking is already at work shaping our lives in small, important ways as office layouts are being redesigned with no-touch door entities and elevator interfaces.
Touchless tech is changing our lives in largers ways, as well, and it was highlighted at the conference.
Take touchless payment. David Echegoyen, GM of Membership at Walmart, in his panel on How Large Orgs Can Launch Ideas at Startup Speed, understands touchless pay innovation is driven by data, but it’s ultimately about the people who will use the innovation: When Walmart launched a feature that let people scan items on their phone and walk out of the store, the data was indicating customers “wanted frictionless, no normal checkout process,” said Echegoyen. “But honest customers would then take the time to go find an associate to say, ‘I paid.’” Decades of having to pay for things meant people wanted validation that they could now leave; that conditioning prevented them from using their phone and walking out the door. The end innovation included an exit pass. You see, said Echegoyen, “If you don’t understand the human, the product fails.”
Put another way, says SVP and CIO of Kroger Yael Cosset, in his panel, How to Foster Innovation in a Remote Working World, in our new digital society, “It’s about adapting, breaking the mold, accelerating the transformation.” Or as Cosset’s panel partner Ram Krishnan, Global Chief Commercial Officer of PepsiCo, put it: “The challenge is being nimble, to iterate. To plan and change.”
We agree. Innovating how companies innovate means understanding their ecosystem as well as history and imagining the “art of the possible .”
In Designing a Better Future After COVID-19, panel member Gary Hustwit, a filmmaker known for design documentaries, recalled the historical precedent for design responding to disaster (WW2 in post-war Germany, Japan and the UK). Driven by scarcity, lack of materials and the destruction of government systems, a generation reinvented these things with design. Now with the scarcity of PPE, disrupted economic systems and an ongoing health crisis, it’s a moment for self-reflection in design and the enhanced social value it has the potential to offer.
Kelly Rozumalski, Secure Connected Health Director at Booz Allen Hamilton, gave a glimpse into exactly this in her panel (Securing a Connected Future: What You Need to Know in 2021). Speaking to what’s on the horizon in healthcare, she built on patterns we’ve tracked and will continue writing about — embedded intelligence, human-as-a-sensor, hyper customization with regard to precision medicine, and making the invisible visible. Mirroring our findings, she expects great strides in people becoming healthier in general, and she sees data driving everything. “We’re already augmenting the experience through wearables, whether worn or implanted in the body,” she said. “They continue to increase in sophistication. And I can easily imagine 5G connectivity at the edge will become fully integrated into our lives the way smartphones are today. [We’ll] move beyond monitoring our health. Transform to a more predictive and proactive care state.” And whatever the next big technology is, quantum computing or something else, she says “cyber security is going to accelerate this innovation instead of delaying it.”
From wearable health devices to connected surgical equipment and MRI machines that make healthcare delivery easier and more efficient; to our multitudinous online interactions with one seamless experience; to semi-autonomous vehicles that move our data from the information domain to the physical domain, our lives with regard to healthcare, payment, entertainment, education travel, housekeeping, social media and more, are shifting.
And while, according to Abdullah (aka Dr. Jay) , SVP and deputy chief officer at Mastercard, “the economic impact of cyber crime and card fraud [will reach] $5.6 trillion in the next five to six years because everything is so connected,” it’s now not just about protecting transactions; with COVID-19 and more people working from home and being more connected than ever, it’s about protecting the entire ecosystem.
The invisible.
In all, the FastCo innovation festival excelled at bringing divergent thinkers and innovators together to connect dots and examine opportunities and risks as new technologies are deployed in the mainstream.
But as trackers of technology and disruption, we know the biggest opportunities are found when we uncover new technologies instead of responding to them. When we see the innovations ahead of the crisis, spot the possibilities inherent in other industries’ solutions, and realize that innovation is neither random nor unpredictable; it simply comes from an unpredictable place.
dMASS clients have the tools that give them vision into the invisible and help them bring the possible to life. To receive updates on future products, opportunities and news from dMASS, sign up for our newsletter here.
Originally published at https://www.dmass.net on October 30, 2020.
