Data, Digital, Discovery - the Future of Innovation - Dr Ralph Kerle

Two recent examples show how digital disruption is having a huge impact on traditional businesses and business models and how rapidly innovation as a practice and process will need to change to keep up with the impact. Over the last two years, one of Australia’s largest publicly owned talent management organizations has seen one of its major client’s spend fall from A$30million per annum to $15million per annum, with expectations the total spend year ending 2012 will be around $5million. For any company this is a huge drop in revenue and as the Managing Director said “It is not only a huge drop in revenue for us, it is a huge drop in revenue for the total HR industry in Australia.” This contraction has come about because of the disruption and emergence of digital technology in the HR market, specifically LinkedIn.

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IT growth and global change: Ray Kurzweil interview - McKinsey Quarterly - Business Technology - Strategy

The inventor, businessman, and author Ray Kurzweil explains how the exponential growth of technologies will transform industries and pose new opportunities—and hurdles—for business and society. Every executive recognizes the fast pace of technological development but grapples with the billion-dollar question: what happens next, and when? Ray Kurzweil has precise answers based on his thesis that information technology will continue to develop exponentially, leading to a not-so-distant future when artificial intelligence dominates our daily lives, genes can be reprogrammed away from cancer, and solar power can provide the world with all the energy it needs.

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The Real World According to the Minds of Two Game Designers - A TED Collage

Two of the world's leading game design experts, Jesse Schell , an academic, and his even younger peer, Seth Priebatsch, an entrepreneur offer a take on game technology and how they see it evolving and how it influences the world in which we live.

From his official bio: "Prior to starting Schell Games in 2004, Jesse Schell was the Creative Director of the Disney Imagineering Virtual Reality Studio, where he worked and played for seven years as designer, programmer and manager on several projects for Disney theme parks and DisneyQuest, as well as on Toontown Online, the first massively multiplayer game for kids.

"Schell is also on the faculty of the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, where he teaches classes in Game Design and serves as advisor on several innovative projects. Formerly the Chairman of the International Game Developers Association, he is also the author of the award winning book The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses."

Schell Games' latest endeavor: creating a video game based on the box office hit The Mummy. 

Two things you'll notice about Seth Priebatsch: One, his infectious, get-you-out-of-your-chair enthusiasm. Two, the inventory of entrepreneurial feats he's managed to accumulate at a remarkably young age. The 21-year-old founded his first startup at age 12, and by age 18, he'd founded another -- PostcardTech, which makes interactive marketing tours for CD-ROM.

Now he's working on SCVNGR, "a massive experiment in building a mobile game together." Backed by Google Ventures, SCVNGR is part game, part game platform.  Players play SCVNGR by going places, doing challenges and having fun -- outside of the office, beyond the screen, in the real world. Organizations use SCVNGR by building on the game layer by adding their own challenges to the places they care about.

Leadership, Thinking Ten Years Ahead - Imagining the Future of Leadership - Harvard Business Review

I'm convinced that — with new skills tuned to external future forces — leaders can make better organizations, better communities, and a better world. Ourlast big economic driver was engineering and the first stage of the digital age. At Institute for the Future, in our annual ten-year forecast program, we see an underlying shift to biology as a driver, and what I'm starting to think of as the "global well-being economy." If biology and the global well-being economy will drive the future, what does that suggest for leaders? How can leaders grow their own empathy with nature and the global well-being economy? Self-interest and competition will not be enough.

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