Nothing’s new for long. Products, systems, and even knowledge all begin to fade in relevance the moment they come into being. This sneaking obsolescence, at least in tech, may be accelerating, with many skills having a current shelf-life of less than three years.
And FOBO—the Fear of Becoming Obsolete—isn’t restricted to workers. Companies also know innovation is critical to relevance, but most still struggle to find, harness, and sustain it.
Two potentially surprising findings:
- Innovation may be decreasing in recent decades in the US, as measured by disruptive scientific paper production (down 92–100% between 1945 and 2010) and patents (down 79%–92% from 1980–2010), according to research published in Nature.
- Prior studies by the Harvard Business Review also found no statistically significant relationship between investments in exploratory R&D and end value. True innovation is elusive and not so easily scaled up.
Today’s article is dedicated to this pursuit, as we will look at some of the top innovators of 2024, consistent traits among them, and how organizations can become places for more innovation to take seed and flourish.
Innovators and Their Fields
Relevant innovation is a highly subjective measure, so we turned to some of the most established sources for help, like MIT Technology’s 35 Under 35 report on breakthrough innovations in 2024 and innovators shaping the future. With prior laureates including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Linux pioneer Linus Torvalds, Tesla’s JB Straubel, iRobot’s Helen Greiner, IBM Master Inventor Mandy Chessell, and many more, it has a strong track record of identifying future pioneers in tech.
We also consider additional outlets and organizations that are driving disruptive innovations in 2024. But first, some of the fields where this work is getting done include:
Artificial Intelligence: With plenty of existing coverage on OpenAI, Nvidia, and the like, we open with the Sundai Club—a GenAI hackathon that meets monthly in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as profiled by Will Knight in Wired.
Including pro developers, project managers, a member of the military, and students from MIT and Harvard, the Sundai Club brainstorms ideas and builds them. Examples include: AI News Hound (which scans ArXiv for papers, then compares Reddit conversational heat to how covered the topic has been on Google News, to find fresh stories), SundAI Travel (generates customized travel itineraries), and SundAI Town (AI-generated game that explains hackathons). One even automatically converts ArXiv papers to TikToks.
Biotechnology: Normal Phenomena of Life (NPOL) is an online platform launched by Natsai Audrey Chieza and Christina Agapakis for products built from interdisciplinary collaborations of biologists, engineers, material scientists, and designers, as a direct-to-consumer biotechnology product vendor.
Their goods include clothing colored by bacteria and lamps made from bioconcrete. While offerings are currently quite expensive, they aim to keep them in circulation for the long-haul, with products that are easily repaired and upgraded.
Climate and Energy: Concrete is the second most-used substance on Earth after water and a massive contributor to greenhouse gases (as much as all the world’s passenger vehicles). MIT-profiled innovator Cody Finke co-founded the company Brimstone with the aim to solve this, replacing limestone in the mixture with silicate rocks that do not give off carbon dioxide. Brimstone’s method, if used with renewable energy, could make entirely emissions-free cement that’s on par in both cost and quality.
Quantum Technology: Andrea Rocchetto, an Italian theoretical physicist and CEO of Ephos, is one of a handful of pioneers aiming to use photonics in hardware—fiber optics in chips to process light—as a highly efficient means of moving data. He began the project after returning home during the COVID-19 pandemic and finding a massive talent pool entirely outside of big tech. Their quantum facility is already open, with the first chips arriving in weeks and their fabrication process expected by the end of the year.
Robotics: Fangyu Zhang at UT Southwestern Medical Center, an MIT-profiled innovator, has created an entire biorobotics platform for medical uses. These swimming microrobots have already treated bacterial infections like pneumonia (before being dissolved by the body) and are being developed with an aim to treat cancer. Chemotherapy-armed biobots could attack tiny targets, like tumor cells, while avoiding healthy ones, allowing treatment with fewer side effects.
Commonalities
Among these innovators are numerous commonalities: from a willingness (and capacity) to take on risk to a fascination and genuine interest in continued learning. All exhibit strong motivation or passion beyond the work, harness cross-discipline expertise, and utilize collaborations, networks, and environments that enable their successes to scale.
The Sundai Club is supported by a Cambridge nonprofit (Aethos), and its diverse membership gathers on Sundays, driven by the desire to learn and build new things with emerging tech.
NPOL’s Natsai Chieza has a degree in architecture but became fascinated in biotech while getting her master’s degree. Her partner Christina Agapakis is a synthetic biologist and science writer who was chosen for the Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2012, and their products are all collaborations across design, art, science, and technology.
Green-concrete company Brimstone was founded by Cody Finke and Hugo Leandri at Caltech, but Finke was an undergraduate researcher in genetics before getting his doctorate from Caltech in electrochemistry. On LinkedIn, he credits numerous mentors and support from several venture capital firms to helping them get on their feet.
Andrea Rocchetto came from academia in England and the US, driven by a fascination in the overlap of physics and computing. His QC startup Ephos was born when he partnered with three other distinguished researchers and seized on Italy’s untapped potential. They’ve raised millions in venture capital and joined NATO’s Defense Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA).
Fangyu Zhang’s work combines deep medical knowledge and tech, and he began his education in materials science and biological engineering, before moving to nanoengineering. His work also comes as part of teams, coupled with other researchers and within the structure of academic research.
Nurturing Innovation In-House
The founders or outward faces of startups often draw our attention, flush with venture capital or funded by research grants and student labor, but these projects are the work of numerous individuals, and people with such talents and passions currently work at companies all over the world.
So how do business leaders go about developing such innovation in-house, instead of investing in R&D only to watch their best employees jump ship to found their own startups?
Helping business leaders in driving innovation is a core interest of numerous publications, but here are some ideas we love at PTP for seizing on the future of innovation in business:
Fast Fail Feedback: The fear of failure in the workplace is a certain way to ensure safe, repetitive contribution. As Columbia professor Rita McGrath writes, organizations must “come to the conclusion that intelligent failures are crucial to the process of organizational learning and sense-making. Failures show you where your assumptions are wrong.”
She defines intelligent failures as those that can be planned, modest, managed quickly, tested at checkpoints, and used to inform the business.
And failing fast has become a core virtue in Silicon Valley, but that’s easier said than done. One way to enable it is through regular, structured feedback, both through open communication and at scheduled times, with emphasis on honesty, trust, and standardized methods.
The Stanford Design School proposed the method: “I like, I wish, what if,” or leading with positives, moving to constructive criticisms, and then brainstorming alternatives.
Altogether, Fast Fail Feedback is more than an open door for innovation; it’s a regular part of processes.
Trend Loops: The tech world changes fast, and that necessitates keeping an active sense of what’s happening outside.
Soliciting steady input from customers is ideal for any outward-facing business, but it can also be a part of the internal process, with team members regularly contributing their knowledge of trends, including emerging toolsets and skills. This kind of mentoring or reverse mentorship in tech keeps ideas flowing in multiple directions, through workshops or regular collaborations.
This is multi-directional flow, or trend loop, for continuous innovation.
Intrapreneurship: Fostering innovation inside organizations can be done like running your own in-house incubator, empowering or even tasking people to take on a problem just as they might a startup.
Given the shelter and resources and measured like venture capitalists, this can fire the inner pioneer in your in-house innovators.
It’s also a means of embracing in-house disruption, and one that might just convince employees planning to leave to start up their own to do so within the shelter of their current organization.
Cross-Discipline Collaboration: Innovation often comes from the sparks or collisions between areas. Sometimes a method from one arena can be applied to solve a problem in another, or together they can become something new entirely.
In workplaces, getting people together across silos can be challenging, but in development, we see this as one virtue of a Product-Oriented Delivery structure (PODs). By empowering small teams across disciplines to own the entire life of their task (product, component, etc.), collaboration is not only enabled but central to getting the work done.
[Our CEO has written extensively on POD teams and how they can help with Agile development, for example.]
Strategic Partnerships: Of course, like all the innovators above, no one does it alone, and collaboration is key in tech.
And with decades of experience and a proven track record, PTP is one partner worth considering for great talent, innovative solutions, emerging tech, and consulting. In addition to providing outside resources, we can help you inspire, and harness, your own innovation from within.
Conclusion: AI for Innovation
Profiling AI tools for innovation is an entire article in itself, and many devotees of generative AI already swear by it as an aid for making new breakthroughs. With a capacity to rapidly wrangle and work across vast amounts of data, for example, there’s no doubt it has great utility in this process.
But how AI really inspires emerging innovation is less clear. Built from a mashup of existing sources, can GenAI solutions really help find things completely outside the box? Can they bring the kinds of unique perspectives and cross-discipline knowledge together in focused, novel, meaningful ways, as the innovators we profiled above?
As former global Go champion Lee Sae Dol pointed out, people created AI, and it is populated and run on our data. These were certainly true innovations, but it may still take human innovators to really move us in such bold new directions.
References
Real Innovation Requires More Than an R&D Budget, Harvard Business Review
These are the 2024 CNBC Disruptor 50 companies: See the full list of startups riding the AI wave, CNBC
Hacking Generative AI for Fun and Profit, Wired
Ephos wants to shatter the market for AI and quantum chips with a new design based on glass, TechCrunch
4 Pillars of Innovation Every Organization Needs, Harvard Business Review
These New Biomaterials Can Help Decarbonize Fashion and Construction, Wired
Are you squandering your intelligent failures?, Rita McGrath Group
