Innovation focused industries vary widely. Developing the next digital healthcare system has little in common with the next generation of wind power turbines. Social media entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley or New York speak a different language from biotechnology companies in Boston. However, the commonality between these varied areas is scalability: if you can reach a wide audience quickly, you will have a strong economic model. If done right, you should also have positive social and environmental impacts.
Scalability has been written about many times before, but the main difference today is we are seeing a wide variance between sectors. While Instagram or Twitter reach millions and billions of people, renewable energy and new pharmaceuticals face challenges to scale.
I’ve spent most of my career in finance, but have also worked in strategy and business development for large companies such as Intel and BP. For a long time I worked in venture capital and banking and I decided to join Intel so I could see how world class companies work from the inside. Shortly after I joined the team in Shanghai, we had a global strategy meeting at company headquarters in Santa Clara. I was all excited and full ideas. My colleagues patiently listened and agreed that some of them actually were pretty good. But the fundamental issue was that they were difficult to standardize and thus difficult to scale.
As we move ahead in our mastery of technology, we do not necessarily need or want standardized products or solutions. However, the tools to create those products need to be standardized such that they can pull in relevant data and inputs to create the end product or solution we want. You want those made to order skinny jeans? Great, but the systems need to translate your design to a product and then check with the warehouse to ensure stock and availability in real time. Looking forward to playing in a virtual reality world soon with your friends or strangers across the world? Fine, but the platform needs to be robust, interoperable and support hardware and software while minimizing bandwidth to keep fidelity.
Scalability and standardization go hand in hand and I hate to say it, but they are rarely interesting or sexy. Discussing how to scale residential and commercial solar by creating standardized legal and financing documents will cause most people to go to sleep or tune out before I finish writing this sentence. Nevertheless, getting these systems and standards in place is absolutely critical to unlock creative potential and marshal our global resources to create a better tomorrow.
So here are a few areas to consider as we look to scale our best solutions in the next few years.
Technology
1. Data farms and energy usage. Again, not so sexy, but you are most likely finding this post through a google search, which means you are using energy and remote computer hardware. More data and energy efficient, more secure servers are a critical component of our core technology infrastructure. While the designs may be proprietary having scalable solutions within a company or government entity is crucial
2. Virtual reality. VR is all over the place with Oculus acquire and likely to be integrated in some form into Facebook and many competing ideas coming forward. Privacy, data security and operating system issues are just a few of the components that are going to be necessary to get in place to standardize and scale
Energy
1. Shale gas. The ugly word – fracking. However, so called non-traditional gas production is not going away. Some states have banned it altogether and many in the energy industry are fighting against national rules regulating the sector. Standardization would go a long way towards making the area more economically and environmentally sustainable.
2. Carbon emissions. Whatever side of the political spectrum one is on, my informal poll over the last several years shows that carbon will have a price sooner than later in the US. Perhaps after the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP21) in December, where the US and China will both be represented, we will have a framework for a global system that works. In any case, corporations, governments and economists alike would do well to create a standardized system across the US that links to a global standard, rather than have a state by state mess. Just ask anyone who has been trying to scale renewable energy, which has seen massive growth, but has faced strong headwinds due to inconsistencies in policies from state to state.
There are many more examples, but the simple fact is standards and scalability are the way we can change this world for the better and the more buy in we can get from different stakeholders the faster we can move forward.