You don’t need to look far today to find an article, book or speech on the topic of innovation. The hype meter is at 110 percent. It’s as though someone kicked an anthill, and the ants, fearful but unaware of the actual danger, started running about in all directions.

Such is the case, unfortunately, every time we encounter massive change. Whether it’s the printing press, the automobile or the Internet, we are consistently amazed by our own ability to react and adapt to change. Part of the reason is that big change rarely comes in singular form. It is often accompanied by a context of uncertainty, with myriad forces interacting in chaotic ways.

I recall a discussion I had with Dee Hock, the founder of VISA International, where he said, “We’re all playing a new game by the old rules. We just don’t know what the new rules are yet.” Indeed, at times it feels as though the world is entirely different while we are standing still.

So what’s ahead? A mixed bag for sure. But a few key trends stand out.

Pressure to Innovate
We will see mounting pressure on all industries to innovate at even faster rates than today. As quality, access to talent, supply chains, pricing and cost efficiencies narrow into narrowing band of differentiation, innovation will be a hotbed of competition. In many cases this will lead to rampant innovation with an emphasis on newness and quantity of innovation over its utility. In short we innovate because we can, not because we should. The result will be interesting from an academic standpoint, but I’m afraid it may add megatons of slightly used and quickly outdated gadgetry to the ecosystem. The world is already reeling from decades of innovation in plastics and electronics that will be biodegrading in landfills for the next few hundred millennia. Home fabrication and 3D printers will make what’s happened to date seem like a drop in the bucket. The bottom line here is that we need to become as adept at innovating the way we dispose of our good ideas as we are in creating them.

Global Services PREDICTIONS

Going forward, only the “most innovative will survive”. In the outsourcing context, that’s what more and more companies will strive to do by sourcing talent globally

The dynamics of global economies will force even the most conservative companies to innovate.

Young Innovators
Next, the impact of innovation on education. Like just about everyone in the workforce today, my training on innovation came in bits and pieces, and even then the lessons were few and far between. Innovation was historically a mix of brute force and intuition with a dose of luck. No longer. Universities are starting to add innovation-specific offerings across disciplines, from engineering to business. What’s even more startling is the heightened emphasis on innovation methods and skills in K-12. Programs such as DestinationImagiNation (www.destinationimagination.org) have provided more than nine million children in 20 countries worldwide with training in innovation and creative problem solving. These “kids” are just starting to flow through the workforce. When they arrive their ability to innovate will make the rest of us appear to have been asleep at the wheel.

Virtual and Cheap Experimentation
Third, no nation has the edge. At least not yet. Sure, the U.S.A. is still the world’s envy when it comes to higher education. While the U.S.A. may outsource to the rest of the world, the rest of the world outsources education to the U.S.A. But that is a false security, if any at all. Unlike the infrastructure and facilities, laboratories and scientific equipment needed to train the last few generations of innovators, tomorrow’s innovators will have access to all the knowledge and simulation they need at their fingertips. You see, innovation is really about increasing your confidence factor in predictable results from unpredictable experimentation. When experimentation was expensive, very few could truly innovate. As experimentation becomes more virtual, it also becomes cheaper, and in some cases, except for the time expended, free! It’s like creating a casino where the chips are free but the payouts are real.

Driven By the Market
Lastly, the greatest impact of innovation in the next few years will be the change it creates in the nature of personalization. In the end, markets can only be as rich in diversity, options and innovations as customers are in their preferences. This is where innovation will most dramatically alter the behaviors of markets. Innovation has always been about creating products and services that meet the largest number of interested buyers. However, as innovation has accelerated, we’ve consistently shortened the useful life of each new innovation. This may increase the rate at which products and services turnover in the market but it’s a fundamentally inefficient way to address the needs of each consumer. This is where innovation takes on a new dimension that simply has no parallel in today’s market. We may talk about “markets of one,” but we’ve hardly delivered on the vision. When we do, innovation will be finally driven by the market.

The challenges are there, but so are the opportunities to open up vast new global markets through innovation.

In the interim, certainly for the next three years we’ll scurry about trying to make sense of the commotion, looking for a way forward. I have no doubt that we will get there, we always do although perhaps not in the way we had expected. What’s clear is that we will not just innovate products and services but also innovation itself.    

Voted as one of the IT industry’s six most influential consultants by InformationWeek magazine, Tom is one of the industry’s most prolific thought leaders. He is also the ex-MD of Perot Systems Innovation Lab where he ran a global practice focused on sourcing innovation.