Another more disorganised article from McKinsey that outlines two themes for the disruptive 'roll-out' of innovation in this downturn: the 'Internet of People' and the 'Internet of Things'. Both phrases have been aired before: they refer to the increases, by orders of magnitude, in connectivity.
Yet, the authors list a series of innovations in downturns that are remarkable for being state-financed and non-commercial. Business spin-offs were a by-product, not a source of these new applications.
The history of recession is also the story of technology advances that overturned the existing competitive order. Digital computers were born during the Great Depression, the Ethernet during the 1970s oil crisis, the IBM personal computer in the early 1980s recession, and the World Wide Web, which emerged from the recession of the early 1990s. And it was during the last recession, in the early 2000s, that innovative companies began staking out new leadership positions via the Internet. Apple, for instance, changed the business model in the music industry when it launched its popular iPod music player, synched to its online iTunes music store. Amazon.com pioneered commercial “cloud computing” by selling Web services that tapped its huge in-house base of servers and other IT infrastructure. Google, meanwhile, became an online industry leader by linking its search engine to advertising.
It is only in the last twenty years that innovation has moved centre-stage in culture and acquired a cultural energy of its own: perhaps we ought to be examining when innovation became a cultural artefact and how that has proved to be an independent factor in business plans and capital allocation.
Is innovative capacity now a signalling factor for companies and individuals to show that they maintain coping strategies for profiting from the perceived advances in scientific knowledge and change?