Ten More Things to Stop and Think About
As we worked this summer to start putting together our fifth edition in the Citi GPS Disruptive Innovations series, there was a concern that the entries we were receiving didn’t have that “wow” factor that we felt in prior years. So we re-thought and cast our net wider, and put a new slate together. But for some reason, we still couldn’t muster up a load of excitement. Mildly dejected, we started to speak to people outside of our circle and that’s when we had an ‘aha!’ moment and realized that over the years we had immersed ourselves in so many publications and websites that much like ‘innovation junkies’, it was taking more and more for us to get excited about things that could be disruptive and change the future. Looking at our list with new eyes — more like the ones we had when we started this series five years ago — we now have here what we think is thought-provoking and fantastic.
Imagine going to the doctor and having a routine blood test that can scan your body for cancer tumors. Or being told that your child was born with a genetic disease but then finding out it can be ‘cured’ by injecting a virus which can edit the defective gene. Both of those things are possible in the near future with the advent of liquid biopsy techniques and CRISPR-based gene editing.
In transportation, robotic piloting in commercial jets could mean that your flight is unmanned and that the days of your plane being delayed because the pilot is stuck in traffic on the way to the airport are long gone. Or maybe you don’t want to take that short-haul flight at all, and instead could jump into a Hyperloop pod that shoots you 700mph in a vacuum tube to your destination. Artificial intelligence-piloted planes and Hyperloop systems could be the driver of new transportation modes.
In financials, it seems like there are new breakthroughs in FinTech almost every day. The same is true for Internet of Things (IoT) where a positive environment is emerging as the number of connected devices is increasing and high-speed bandwidth is being widely deployed. We look at how adding a payments layer to any IoT construct helps the proliferation and monetization of IoT use cases. Blockchain — primarily known as the basis for cryptocurrency — could soon be used to change how we trade physical commodities, but also how our local electricity market operates. And in an attempt to take back share from passive managers, active investment managers are disrupting their pricing models by considering a performance-oriented fee structure.
Robots designed to replace humans through the automation of factory floors has been a trend for a few years, but new developments in end-of-arm tools for robots which aim to mimic the function of the human hand could mean that we will see robots performing a new range of jobs and functions. On the flip side, new low-code development platforms are coming that will facilitate the rise of the “citizen developer” who can create software applications for the business world without the need of a traditional software developer and thereby bridge the gap between the supply of developers and the demand for application development. Finally, we look at the next generation of tobacco — Heat Not Burn tobacco — which gives the user the enjoyment of a traditional cigarette without the smell and harmful smoke.
And we start it all off with a look at what big companies can do to transform themselves into innovators. We hope you find these ‘Ten More Things to Stop and Think About’ as exciting as we do.
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