Skip to content

Exponential Wisdom Episode 15 notes – Driving Innovation

Dan Sullivan and Peter Diamandis discuss 8 key points to triggering innovation in an organization. 

  • We used to live in a material economy. I trade my one thing, you trade your one thing, and we walk away. Relative value doesn’t grow. 
  • BUT in the idea economy, we each walk away with two ideas, not just one thing. Trading our ideas just lead to exponential growth. 
  • Skyrocketing innovation of the last two hundred years is because of this idea trade. 
  • Value of ideas is far greater than material resources. 
  • In 1950’s,  7% of people lived in cities. Today, over 38%.
  • By 2050, 70% projected. 
  • Concentration or conversations like on cities causes explosions of new ideas. 
  • All 8 billion people will soon be connected to 1mbps internet. 
  • Going into the web is the new exploration. You enter into the environment, and don’t know what you will get until you find it. 
  • How do you use these ideas to trigger innovation? 
  • Open office space triggers encounters. Give them a reason to run into each other. 
  • How do you create mashups at events? 
  • Unconference – create a themed room, and let whoever wants present for ten minutes on the topic of the room. 
  • “allow creative chaos.”
  • A random agenda populates. How do you create an organization where the mailroom person can present a great idea? 
  • Cities are a place to exchange and generate ideas. 
  • Peter Diamandis, “don’t think out of the box, think in a really small box… When you force a team to solve a problem with massive constraints, it really forces a team to think Innovatively.”
  • Giving too many resources delivers slow, expensive and inefficient results. 
  • When delivering a challenge with massive constraints, one portion of the people will say, “that’s impossible” and give up. 
  • Another group will say, “sure, but there’s no way we can do that using the old methods. Let’s start completely from scratch and look at the problem differently.”
  • This is what Elon Musk did with Tesla – he started a car company with no legacy. No unions, no old limitations.
  • “When failure is not an option, success gets really expensive.”
  • With something like X prize, even the teams that don’t win, wind up making huge innovations in different key mechanisms to the process. 
  • Why do people fear failure? Sunk cost fallacy, fear of reputation loss. 
Published inExponential Wisdom PodcastPodcast Notes