It is one of the big anxiety questions in modern business thinking. On the one hand economists like Tyler Cowan believe the fundamental rate of innovation is slowing. On the other hand economists like Eric Brynjolfssen think that millions of middle class jobs may soon be lost to accelerating automation. You can see a video recording of the two of them debating the point face to face here.
So who is right? This question is almost impossible to resolve cleanly with data. It is too subjective. One man’s innovation is another’s incremental improvement. How you categorize and how you count innovations is highly malleable. And since many economists still disagree on basics like how unemployment is counted or how inflation is measured – it doesn’t seem likely we will get an empirical answer to this pace of innovation question anytime soon. And yet business leaders must form a view.
The scenarios that help large companies form sound business strategies often need to look ahead 5 to 10 years For example what’s the point in a construction firm investing in its prime city real-estate, long term ‘land bank’, if nobody will need more office blocks 10 years from now?
Our latest CEO and senior business leader survey tested belief in whether technology innovation is fundamentally slowing or accelerating. Here’s the result from the North American respondents.
Bear in mind that the business leaders here were from businesses (not government) and we exclude IT industry firms from this survey (no computer hardware, software, IT services or telecoms firms). What this data tells me is that most business leaders still believe science and technology is accelerating. However a sizable minority do seem to think it is slowing down. I guess I was a little surprised that a total of 39% have a perception that it is slowing – though more than half of those only selected the weakest agreement level.
Is your CEO one of those believers in a great innovation slowdown? I think it is those business leaders, who will face the biggest disruptive shocks as digital technologies such as machine intelligence, 3D printing, robotics and the internet of things accelerate over the coming decade.