Meta-Trends - The Future is Faster Than You Think

How Converging Technologies Are Disrupting Business, Industries, and Our Lives

Transforming Your Company from Linear to Exponential

Competition for many of America's Fortune 500 companies is no longer coming from China and India. Today, it's coming from two guys in a garage with a startup leveraging exponentially growing technologies. YouTube went from a startup on Chad Hurley's personal credit cards to being purchased by Google for $1.4 billion in less than 18 months. Groupon leaped from conception to $6 billion in value in less than two years.

At the same time that billion-dollar startups are materializing - seemingly out of nowhere - hundred-year-old industry cornerstone companies are crumbling. In 1996, Kodak had a market cap of $28 billion with 140,000 employees. In 2012, it went bankrupt. That same year, another company in the photography business called Instagram was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion. The company, which had been founded only a year earlier, had just 13 employees.

The difference between Kodak and Instagram is the difference between a linear and an exponential organization - the subject of this keynote.

Speaker Peter Diamandis explains how exponential organizations don't use armies of people or large physical plants but instead focus on utilizing information technologies. Physical equipment like Nikon cameras, Magellan GPS devices, libraries of books, or music albums now simply become apps on our smartphones. An exponential organization is one whose impact (or output) is disproportionally large compared to its number of employees because of its use of networks, automation, and leveraging of the crowd.

Exponential Technologies Causing Disruptive Innovation

Speaker Peter Diamandis provides a passionate, insightful, and extremely useful keynote on the impact of exponentially growing technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, digital medicine, and nanomaterials. He discusses how breakthroughs in these areas will transform products, companies, industries, and society over the next 20 years. He provides key insights on how human society has transformed from "local and linear" to one that is now "global and exponential" and he explains how this change is accelerating disruptive stress or disruptive opportunity, depending on the company's point of view. These technologies are also leading to the greatest epoch of wealth creation ever, where new billion-dollar startups are coming out of seemingly nowhere at the same time that 50- and 100-year-old, billion-dollar companies are going out of business.

Diamandis also discusses the explosion of data that is transforming how companies operate and how to tap into big data with a brand new set of exponential organization tools that allow companies to make 100-fold improvements in their research and development strategies.

The Coming Age of Abundance: Understanding Humanity's Future

Since the dawn of humanity, a privileged few have lived in stark contrast to the hardscrabble majority. Conventional wisdom says this gap cannot be closed. But it is closing - fast. Four forces - exponential technologies, the do-it-yourself innovator, the techno-philanthropist, and the rising billion - are conspiring to solve our biggest problems.

In his keynote address, speaker Peter Diamandis examines human need by category - water, food, energy, healthcare, education, communication, and freedom - and addresses how a range of powerful technologies such as synthetic biology, embedded networks and cloud computing, artificial intelligence and robotics, biotechnology, and medicine are transforming what was once scarce into something abundant.

Providing abundance is humanity's grandest challenge. This is a keynote about how we can rise to meet it.

Creating a Culture of Innovation & Breakthrough

Based on the success of the Ansari X Prize (which stimulated the creation of a billion-dollar private spaceflight industry) and the success of additional X Prizes in life sciences, energy, environment, and exploration, speaker Peter Diamandis explains how to incentivize breakthroughs in your company and industry. He explains how traditional thinking, risk aversion, and incrementalism will cause the demise of companies unable to cope with the coming decades of disruptive innovation.

Through concrete examples and lessons, Diamandis addresses two options:

How to create a culture of innovation within your company How to incentivize the outside world to help you solve your biggest problems

Diamandis explains how the rapid growth of key exponential technologies (nano, info, bio) are empowering individuals and small companies to do what only governments were able to achieve a few decades ago. Such technologies will drive a period of significant disruption or opportunity, depending on the company's mindset. Diamandis' ultimate message is that companies cannot remain stagnant. They must evolve or they will die. You must either disrupt your own business model or you will be disrupted by others.