Innovation Is Coming In Many Forms And From Many Places | Seeking Alpha
Almost a month ago I wrote a post titled “We’re in a Recession; Start a Company.”
It is remarkable how many new companies are being formed these days, how many young entrepreneurs are bringing their ideas into this new world and putting them into practice.
Never before has so much been available for these young entrepreneurs to use their restless minds to actually bring something new into the world.
John Thornhill writes this week in the Financial Times,
The internet provides instant access to all the world’s published information while cloud computing creates the capability to reach a global audience overnight at minimal cost.”
That is, young energetic, innovative minds have resources available to them that have never existed before.
And, they are not letting the opportunity go by.
The Evolving World
I concluded my piece cited above saying
things are happening and that even more things are going to be happening.”
While others are worrying about getting consumers back out into the market and which plants should be re-opened, there are a lot of people out there trying to determine (new invention) needs to be created. This is how the ‘new’ era is constructed.”
Furthermore,
There’s so much other stuff going on-there are no experts anymore. We’re living in a world without expertise, and that’s the world of the entrepreneur, like it or not.”
We live in a world of radical uncertainty in which we have little idea of what paths we are really following.
The World Of Social Purpose
Mr. Thornhill brings us another segment of this highly creative and productive world: the world of social purpose.
Mr. Thornhill brings us the picture of Avi Schiffmann.
Mr. Schiffmann is only 17 year old and a high school student from the state of Washington. Mr. Schiffmann has created his own coronavirus data-tracking site- nCoV2019. And the site
has won enthusiastic praise from healthcare officials, a Webby award (which recognizes excellence on the internet) and close to 1bn visitors globally.”
Wow!
But that is not all.
Mr. Schiffmann has launched another site about the Black Lives Matter protests and is working on a project to provide voters with reliable information ahead of November’s US elections. “
Where did he get the ideas for these initiatives? Online videos and chat groups.
The interesting thing about what Mr. Schiffmann has done is his interest in using technology for good… not to make money.
But his experience also illustrates a third, transformational attitudinal change: the determination of a younger generation to use technology for good, not just to make money.
Mr. Thornhill tells us that advertisers offered Mr. Schiffmann $8.0 million to run promotions on his site. And, guess what? Mr. Schiffmann refused the offer.
And, there are other examples. Their incentive…to make an impact with meaning and purpose.
The Space
Slush, a Finnish tech conference organizer, studied thousands of European startup companies and found that 37 percent defined themselves as purpose-driven companies.
An interesting side-light to this picture is that some venture capital firms, although VCs in general tend to prefer later-stage investments rather than “radical innovators intent on changing the world,” state that purpose-driven startups
are more likely to attract the best staff and gain the most traction with consumers, making them better bets.”
The Conclusion
I think that what we can draw from all this is that something very dramatic is taking place beneath the headlines discussing COVID-19 and the economic recession and the shape the recession will; take. This something can have the impact of changing large amounts of what we do and what we will be doing… and how we will be doing it.
One obvious conclusion one can draw from all the activity going on is that the world is going to be much more digitally connected in the future. Although this is a rather obvious statement, the point is that it looks as if this burst of technological advancement is filling in all of the spaces. And, this is the life that we are going to have to place ourselves into… not only in terms of how we live, but in terms of how we invest.
My point is that so much is happening below the headlines, we need to step back and consider what is going on. The young people are not just protesting or calling attention to problems in our society. There is a large number of these young people building the future in terms of what our daily lives are going to be like.
I work with a lot of these young innovators and I am just amazed at the ideas they are coming up with. Yes, the venture capital world is aware of what is happening and making their contribution to the advances taking place. I also work at the Angel finance level and it is remarkable what is happening here, although the Angel finance networks need to be expanded and enlarged.
Mr. Thornhill closes his article, with this advice,
Smart investors will position themselves to benefit from these new currents.”
Disclosure: I/we have no positions in any stocks mentioned, and no plans to initiate any positions within the next 72 hours. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.