CENTER FOR KNOWLEDGE CREATION AND INNOVATION
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Know Laboratories
Thriving in an Age of Accelerating Uncertainty
Table of Contents
Change and Disruption
Grabbing an Option While Falling Through Space
Real Estate Investments
Five Options for Unlocking Equity
Find Experts for Sophisticated Financial Strategies
Manage Operations and a Marketing Campaign
Factors Influencing Real Estate Markets
Demographic Lifestyles and Buying Power
Who’s Free to Move About the Country?
Wireless Resorter or High Country Eagle?
Trends and Forces Shaping Your Work and Investments
Millennials and Boomers Shape the Economy
Emerging Trends in Innovation and Future Jobs
Forces of Change and Disruption
When Will Your Industry Get Turned Upside Down?
Driving Radical and Incremental Innovation
Artificial Intelligence, Quantum Computing and the Future of Work
The Future’s Arriving Faster than You Think. Now What?
Open Innovation, Crowdsourcing Platforms and Disruptive Technologies
What Does It Take to Capitalize on Digital Transformations?
8 Forecasts to Help You Stay Ahead of the Curve
When’s the Next Recession? Will You Be Ready This Time?
If a New Era of Technology is in the Driver’s Seat, Where Are We Going?
Which forces have peaked or are reversing themselves?
What Do You Need To Know As AI Changes Your World?
Looking Through the Glass Door: Cloudy With a Chance of Disruption
Consciousness, Disruption and Chaos. It’s All Good!?
Is It Too Late to Stimulate Your Creative Juices?
Is Doing What You Already Know Ever Enough? New Possibilities. More Choices.
Is Now the Time for You to Digest, Pivot and Profit?
Is It Time to Inhale the Future and Exhale the Past? Just Ask Walmart.
Knowing About New Possibilities Gives You More Choices. Check These Out.
Change Itself Doesn’t Hurt. What Hurts is Our Resistance to Change.
Today you and I are in one of those periods that occur every 200 or 300 years when people don’t understand the world anymore, when the past is not sufficient to explain the future.
“Today digital technology is all the rage because after decades of development it has become incredibly useful. Still, if you look closely, you can already see the contours of its inevitable descent into the mundane. We need to start preparing for a new era of innovation in which different technologies, such as genomics, materials science, and robotics, rise to the fore. You can’t rapidly prototype a quantum computer, a cure for cancer, or an undiscovered material. There are serious ethical issues surrounding technologies such as genomics and artificial intelligence. We’ve spent the last few decades learning how to move fast. Over the next few decades we’re going to have to relearn how to go slow again. So while the mantras for the digital age have been agility and disruption, for this new era of innovation exploration and discovery will once again become prominent. It’s time to think less about hackathons and more about tackling grand challenges.” 
“Our analysis suggests the same will be true of AI, robots and related technologies, but the distribution of jobs across sectors will shift considerably in the process.” PwC said about seven million existing jobs could be displaced by AI from 2017-2037, but about 7.2 million could be created, giving the UK a small net jobs boost of around 200,000. Some sectors would benefit disproportionately, however, with jobs in health increasing by 22%, scientific and technical services by 16% and education by 6%. By contrast manufacturing jobs could fall by 25%, transport and storage by 22% and public administration by 18%, PwC said.” 
“Appealing to people’s emotions helps new ideas cut through the clutter. A “best beats first” innovator takes the measure of a competitor who may be dominating a market with an acceptable product, and then leaps to the front with something even better. It’s about winning through cunning, instead of using the conventional playbook of scaling a similar product with heavy investment to maintain share. Many innovators told us that the “fast follower” meme is bereft of emotion: no one ever wins people over by talking about their capacity for imitation.” 
“They include a set of artificial intelligence technologies – computer vision, deep learning and natural language generation – aimed at helping firms “build decision engines that increasingly automate operations and engagement processes,” Forrester analysts said in the report. Other key technologies include business networking fabrics, blockchain and other distributed ledgers, edge, quantum and serverless computing, additive manufacturing, and virtual, augmented and mixed reality. Unlike building up a company’s tech foundation by leveraging various IT products and services, CIOs are increasingly being tasked with deploying and overseeing capabilities with the goal of “creating breakthrough business solutions.” Mr. Hopkins said. 
“The world is constantly changing and improving, which means any business that does not innovate will be outpaced by the rest of the economy. To ensure your company evolves with the times, consider the following tips: 1. Find inspiration in unlikely places. Some industries, such as health care, endeavor to avoid disruption by placing strict regulations on what and how providers can serve customers. Countless companies have tried to disrupt health care over the years and always encounter plenty of red tape. The latest attempt is a joint venture by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase. Stay tuned: The disruption there may be big. 2. Stay ahead of technology trends. 3. Lean into disruption as a positive force. In all fairness, disruption is no fun for established businesses. Leaders who are able to view the shifting sands as a prompt to improve their organization and evolve with consumer demands, however, stand to gain financially.” 
“For many support workers, robotic surgery is much less satisfying than open surgery. There’s a huge amount of solitary setup work to allow the robot to work, then there’s a big sprint to get the robot draped and docked to the patient. And then…everyone watches the procedure on TV. While the surgeon is operating via an immersive 3-D control console, the scrub folds his arms and waits. The nurse sits in the corner at a PC entering data, or sometimes checking email or Facebook. There’s not a lot to do, but you always have to be ready. Compared to open surgery, it’s clean, safe, and dull work.” 
“Researchers suggest artificial intelligence is now better and faster at detecting cancer than clinicians. Squamous carcinoma. An AI system distinguishes dangerous skin lesions from benign ones. More accurate than dermatologists. An 
“Businesses are changing right before our eyes as the digital transformation takes place around the world. And yet many dinosaur leaders, as I like to call them, are still in these businesses risking extinction if they can’t adapt to this ever-changing environment. It’s true that leaders must be willing to 
”Technology- and data-based transformation has arrived in full force. And if you think that your company or industry is immune, think again. Only twelve percent of the Fortune 500 companies who were in business in 1955 are still around. Before stepping down as CEO of Cisco Systems in June of 2015, John Chambers spoke at a conference and bluntly told attendees, “40 percent of businesses …unfortunately, will not exist in a meaningful way in 10 years. If I’m not making you sweat, I should be. In an era of constant disruption and economic volatility, more and more companies are being forced to confront the reality of diminishing profits, stagnating growth and organizational uncertainty. Regaining the agility to compete comes down to more than simply cutting costs. It’s about embracing new ways to drive cost-consciousness and transparency, identifying mispent (sic) resources in order to unlock new sources of revenue and growth, and creating an operating model that can deliver on business strategy while supporting a culture of continuous transformation.” 
“Turo has a stable of owners who want to rent out their vehicles. Then there are people like me who want to try different makes of cars. Based in San Francisco, Turo makes its money on the margin between what the car owner charges it and what the rental customer is willing to pay, less its costs for insurance, overhead, etc. The company has been around since 2009, but under a different name, RelayRides. It was rebranded in 2015, and has grown exponentially. Turo is now in 49 states (not New York, for insurance reasons) and has about six million customers and 250,000 cars up for rent, according to a company spokeswoman. Satellite operations are now in 56 countries. Once I installed the Turo app on my iPhone and signed up for the service, I put in the dates that I wanted my Corvette, and where I wanted to pick it up.” 
“Hosting applications on cloud platforms is becoming increasingly common, if not an enterprise standard. Among the potential benefits are rapid scalability and elasticity—enabling systems to grow with changing business demands while minimizing costs—as well as on-demand availability, providing agility and faster deployment. Such benefits can be particularly valuable for innovation, which may help explain why cloud computing is growing so quickly. Worldwide, public cloud services revenue is 
“A typical 600-megawatt power plant used at half capacity to handle peak power demand uses as much water as 100,000 people would in a year. Cooling towers at power plants use massive amounts of water–in the U.S., around a trillion gallons a year–to cool down high-temperature steam. Right now, much of that water is just goes back into the atmosphere as plumes of vapor. Varanasi estimates at a 600-megawatt plant, the new technology could save 150 million gallons of water per year.For power plants, or other buildings with cooling towers, using the new equipment could save millions on water bills, in some cases. Industry could reuse the captured water directly. But because the cooling towers create distilled water, it could also be treated further and used for drinking water. “If you install a cooling tower, it’s like doing desalination,” says Varanasi, who estimates that the technology could offset the need for building 70% of new desalination plants in the next decade.” 
“With blockchain technology, South Tyrol can create a chain of certification that authenticates and maintains people’s data indefinitely — instead of having to verify every instance of someone’s data each time a citizen enters their personal information. Moreover, Gasslitter believes blockchain can act as an integration layer to help simplify the province administration’s IT landscape. He says, “We have more than 1,000 different software applications to store and use citizens’ data. Every agency is like a small kingdom and doesn’t share data. Our goal is to simplify processes and increase transparency. We’re creating a model of data sharing within South Tyrol that we hope can be scaled across Italy.”