In 2020 Living Tomorrow celebrates its 25th anniversary! A nice occasion for Diplomatic World to interview our CEO Joachim De Vos about "innovation" and "the future". How will our world look like in 2035? What are the major obstacles for companies that want to innovate and why do we need everyone to innovate in sustainability? #innovation #future #sustainability #globalchallenges

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JOACHIM DE VOS,
CEO TOMORROWLAB
LIVING TOMORROW
For 25 years Living Tomorrow is a unique innovation and
demonstration platform in Brussels where we showcase
innovations in real life settings, and where
we work together with many leading companies.
We host hundreds of thousands of visitors every year,
professionals and consumers. We connect them with
innovation and get in touch with them how our world will
look like in the next decades. TomorrowLab is a strategic
innovation advisory and services provider that started
fifteen years ago; it was created on demand of several
companies that asked us how to innovate and how to create
a continuous process of innovation.
What is your approach on innovation
and what does it mean to you?
Innovation is per definition special and typically human. It
is something that helps us to survive and evolve. For me the
definition of innovation is simple: to see what everyone sees
but doing what no one does. We observe things happening
but only few of us are curious enough to detect the potential
for something new, that will also accepted by the market.
Innovation means also bringing something successfully to
market. There are many ideas for ‘inventions’ that were
never successfully commercialized. At the end this means
no innovation.
We did a global survey amongst 90 CEOs with one question:
“If you're not completely satisfied with the return on
your investment in innovation, what are the obstacles?”
The top five problems we noticed: 1) It takes too long
to bring innovation to market. 2) We are not successful
in collaborating with other companies. 3) There is a
lack of coordination in the process. 4) The organisation
has an unsupportive culture towards innovation. Many
companies focus on continuous lean and mean exercises
and operational excellence but there is no creativity left. All
activity that does not fit within these procedures needs to be
killed. 5) Limited customer and market insights, what will
the future bring to us and our customers? In what direction
will the added value for our company turn?
Let’s take a closer look at these five main obstacles for
innovation and how to tackle them.
First of all, ‘too long time to market’: innovation has to
become a professional procedure, an ‘engine’, embedded
and integrated deep into the organization. TomorrowLab
helps our customers, companies, governments or cities in
developing this attitude. It takes a managerial approach;
innovation cannot stay a Friday afternoon activity. We guide
to create and install a personalized process, an innovation
engine, that takes new ideas step by step to a successful
market introduction.
The second concern was inadequate external collaboration
or joint ventures. The solution is to open up this process
of innovation, and that is a difficult one. Companies and
their employees are trained to work inside a box, in a closed
environment. And now they should tear down the (fire-)
walls around the company and share potential innovation?
One of the main reasons is to protect ‘intellectual property’.
We measure our innovation by the amount of IP generated
in our firms. But that is not the only truth anymore:
new revolutionary design will have to be developed in
group structures, in open platforms, in teams in close
collaboration with other external partners, combining the
best of different worlds. Question yourself who will be
your partner in the future, who will be my competitor in
the future. Markets are changing based on new demands,
new needs or rather unserved needs of customers. Many
companies forget this simple rule. They try to invent
everything themselves. The third topic is a lack of
coordination. What we experience at TomorrowLab is that
many companies have experts, doing deep dives into specific
topics and themes but they lack T-shaped profiles. People
who have an overview on what the whole company is doing,
putting everything in perspective and steering its direction
towards the defined strategic goals.
We bring scarce innovation profiles to companies. We help
to connect different experts and business units to build
future proof companies that excel in innovation. The fourth
element is stimulating a supportive culture and climate
towards innovation and develop an entrepreneurial spirit.
In our programs we try to take employees and leadership
of our customers away from their desks, create a distance
from the daily operational stuff, solving the problems of
yesterday. Managers are trained to make extrapolations
of the past into the future, and there it goes wrong. We
use scenario methodologies: what plausible futures can
we develop for the company? In which ecosystem will
we live and act tomorrow and what are the opportunities
and threats for the future? These exercises create future
awareness, the start of an innovation supportive culture.
The fifth element is lack of future customer and market
insights. We are used to analyse market research of things
we observe in the market today, but how to question the
future if customers cannot imagine what that this would
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mean to them? That is the reason why we have started
Living Tomorrow, envisioning a tangible future, letting
people come in, experience the kitchen or carehome of the
future, think and capture their reflections and sensations.
We capture crucial information in our projects; future
customer feedback that we share with our customers.
What is the world going to look like in 2035?
Nobody can predict the future by looking into the crystal
ball. But I think there are a few certainties for tomorrow.
Sustainability, caring for our planet in the first place. We
will have to save our world; we will have to do more with
less. We will have to use fewer natural resources. We cannot
continue the oil era, consuming and burning fossil fuels
like we are doing today. There are alternatives and we really
need to take them seriously. Solar energy, electrical vehicles,
the race is on. Not only for cars, but also for ships, airplanes
and trucks, challenging the transport and commuting scene.
Short haul will be revolutionized by electric engines
and hyperloops with zero emission in high speed.
Containerships are still using polluting bucker oil and these
ships will be shifting soon to batteries and hydrogen or
nuclear power. We still need a lot of research and innovation
in this area, but we are making progress like we never did
before. The clock is ticking. Even better is not making
the things we don’t need: waste prevention. Landfilling is
still a major issue in many parts of the world. How will
manufacturing look like in 2035? Revolutionized ! Robots
will be everywhere, doing the jobs we did anno 2019. 3D
and 4D printing will boost on demand production, locally.
It could mean the end of cheap mass production in
countries like China.
And Mooreʼs Law will not miss its effect: every 2 years
processing power doubles in performance and uses half the
space. Things become invisble and incredibly smart in an
hyperconnected world: cars, wearables, homes, building,
cities,… everything becomes smart. Today we carry around
100 microprocessors in our watches, smartphones, cars, but
in 2035 that will grow to tens of thousands. They will be
anywhere even inside our body measuring vital parameters
and travelling throughout our bloodstream and brains. Data
will be the new gold and it will push our society further in
enabling new smart services, smart robots, smart devices
doing things like we imagined them but never asked for.
Data in 2035 is like oil before: the engine of new economies.
In the sixties we concentrated large production plants into
specific industrial areas outside our cities. But in 2035,
with clean production, collaboration with robots, 3D and
4D printing, micro manufacturing of personalized things
will again take place in the city centers. What will the
civil society look like? It will be a next generation internet
society; the world is my home.
Remember, the internet is still a very young technology. The
first public webpage was online on August 6th, 1991. And
think about how intrusive online services came into our
daily lives. Changing the way, we shop, work, sport, watch
tv and listen to music, the way we drive our cars and bikes,
take planes, even how we meet or connect with each other.
Our privacy is under attack, although we live in a continent,
Europe, that has the best protection worldwide thanks to
GDPR and EU privacy legislation. But still, private data will
be more open in 2035.
It will be very hard to do things secretly for good and for
bad. Sometimes it is necessary to give up some of our
privacy. Today we think that our computers are stupid and
non-personal, but when robots and humanoids will surround
us in 2035 you will talk to them, tell them your secrets.
They will get to know you better and, in this way, serve you
better, become an intellectual and sometimes even “human”,
as a friend. Most traditional jobs will have been replaced
by robots powered by artificial intelligence but at least as
many new jobs will have been created. Even lawyers or
medical doctors are not ‘safe’ for disruption, meaning that
also highly intellectual jobs will have a problem in surviving
automation.
Some predict that in 2040 we will reach the singularity
point. Singularity means that the processing power of
computers will be equal to that of a human brain. And
taking Moore’s Law into account that means that, 34 years
later, by 2074 one computer chip will be more performant
than all human brains — 10 billion — together. Challenging.
Some people look at this as a nightmare, Elon Musk
started a company – Neuralink – to connect our brain to
a machine to make sure we can catch up with machines.
Nicholas Negroponte stated in his book the Age of Spiritual
Machines that we will be immortal by scanning our brain
into a machine and virtually live forever. I personally believe
that it will move towards a more positive scenario, but
super-powers and super-intellect will be there and yes, there
will be a threat for a divided society between the haves and
the haves not.
Already for this reason I believe in human mankind making
the right choices, crafting the right legislation for the
future of privacy, life (DNA cloning), co-living with super
intelligence. Yes, we are in need of strong politicians,
elected to guide us through new decades of change.
Politicians are dealing with minor issues as Brexit or the
reorganization of our state today. But our real challenge is
to build a future for everyone embracing new technology
and change.
What is the biggest resistance on innovation
and how can it be overcome?
At TomorrowLab we see that the biggest threat to
innovation is the resistance to change part of ourselves,
our companies, organizations and governments. It is
not anymore the strongest that survives but the one that
adapts the most easily to change. Always remember the
famous Kodak case. A typical example of not adapting
to change. The price they paid for not changing, not
innovating, was high: one of the world leaders went
bankrupt in a few years’ time. Kodak was a great
company; they had the best engineers that invented the
digital camera. These people presented that innovation to
their board. The reaction was: ‘Why should we invest in
this kind of inferior technology?’ Bad quality, high prices,
complex and costly production and no “consumables
market” of films and photo prints?
Their outstanding chemical film was performing so well,
making a lot of money in selling films and making photo
prints afterwards. Kodak’s board decided to put the
program on hold, not ready to go to market. And they never
had another chance to even start it, but a few years later it
was simply too late. New competitors were faster and more
agile, the adoption of digital photography went so fast, at
an overwhelming pace. Goodbye Kodak. Same with Nokia
and even today we see “Kodak effects” happening everyday:
in electric mobility, in banking, in retail, in education, in
telecom, in energy, in pharma. Incumbents think there is
plenty of time, being powerful enough to catch up: rather
be a fast follower than a pioneer. Simply a wrong vision and
not sustainable.
How to overcome this change anxiety? First, imagine
the future! Think different and color outside the lines.
Organizations and governments act incremental and inside
out. They believe they can influence the future towards
their preferred scenario. And that is an illusion, we are not
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living in an era of change but in a change of era. One major
fact succeeds another one, none of them can be influenced
by yourself: think 9/11, think economic crisis 2008, think
oil crisis, think energy crisis, think refugee crisis, think
climate impact… These events affect our lives, our work, the
ecosystem we have to live and work in. It is vital to take the
contextual environment of the future into account: think
the unthinkable, not the desirable but the plausible. Open
up your world, connect with external parties outside your
non-comfort zone, listen to different voices and reflect on
what it will mean to you, your family, your business, your
society. Define what will be missed if your company is
about to disappear tomorrow, and will this gap be filled-in
immediately by a competitor? Too many companies are
doing the same thing only slightly different.
In that respect the service or product lacks a soul, there
is no bold vision, no moonshot. That is the difference
everyone feels today between, Tesla or SpaceX and any
other car manufacturer. Tesla tries to save the planet and if
that is not working out, they are preparing to colonize Mars,
leaving our ‘wasted’ earth behind. What a difference in
mindset with ‘competitors’ trying hard to catch up because
they spoiled time with incremental stuff… ‘by making the
chemical film just a little better and a little more profitable’.
So, captains of industry and politicians, start imaging the
future. Not as a one-time exercise but take it seriously,
use external help to facilitate the outside-in and build
that culture of future awareness and innovation. Make
it your DNA and start thinking about what you want to
leave behind for the next generation. Start overcoming the
resistance to change by creating a culture of piloting and
testing. Allow people to see failure as success in progress.
It also helps in embracing uncertainty and unknown
technologies. Start experimenting today, even small
scale: test, learn, reflect and try over. Stay curious in new
technologies, new services that surround you. Try out in a
radically and different way? That is what the Facebooks,
Spotifys and Airbnbs did. And it's not ending with these
companies, it's just the beginning. Innovation is a river, it
constantly flows.
How can we soon feed nine billion people on the
planet and keep it a pleasant and sustainable place
to live on?
Our world population is almost going to double in the next
fifty years. And I think the main challenge for keeping it
a pleasant place to live, is sustainability. There are five
scarce resources that define sustainability on our planet:
food, natural resources, health, water and energy. We
should use and activate our imagination, our brains to
innovate on these five elements. Take food. When there is
not enough food, you have tensions leading to war between
people. We should really look at how to feed our planet in
the next decades. We have to change the way we produce
and consume food, not because we like to, but because we
have to. It is simply impossible that China and India will
consume as much meat as we do today.
New innovations like protein alternatives and lab grown
meat are here to stay. It should become possible that with
the cells of fifty cows we can feed the world. Unthinkable?
We globally slaughter over 150 million animals per day for
food consumption today. We have to take it seriously. Keep
in mind there are many other challenges in food production
and agriculture, because we only have one planet. And
when we double the population, we should also look at our
environmental space and impact on that space The way we
live, the way we build our houses, the way we move, and build
cities — soon mega-mega cities. Big questions, all in transition.
Climate change is urging us to innovate, new diseases are
popping up. Some areas become unlivable, other areas offer
new opportunities. Medical innovation is moving forward
rapidly, and we will get assistance from AI and robots: in
surgery and the exploration of new pharma molecules, the
race towards a new generation of antibiotics is on and also
urgent. Being with so many people on this blue planet will
put a lot of stress on the next coming generations. Water
is another underestimated scarce resource. When we are
at home, we just open the tap and the fresh water flows. It
looks so obvious but it's not. Today Belgium’s position is
third highest in water scarcity in Europe after Cyprus and
San Marino.
At home almost 99% of the water that comes out of the
tap is drinkable water. It has been cleaned to the highest
standard. And we only use one percent of that water to
drink. Time to rethink the whole water ecosystem. Why not
having 99% of the water as grey water, good enough to use
in the garden, dishwashers, washing machines, carwash,
flush toilets or even think about closed loops of water in our
homes. Only the 1% needed for human consumption could
come into our homes meeting the highest standards.
And we should pay real value for this process; today it is
just too cheap. Another major challenge of sustainability is
energy. The world is in transition today evolving from coal
to oil to green energy. The research for green alternatives
is ongoing with wind energy, water energy, solar energy.
We have the potential to make a leap forward changing
geopolitical influences. If you know that only 25.000 sq
miles of solar panels are needed to meet the world’s energy
consumption today. That is the surface of the rain forest
disappearing every year. And the first step could help solve
the latter.
Today we are really innovating towards a new world and I
am very happy to live in this era because there is so much
possible and so much change going on. I do believe in a
positive future. That is why, when you enter our Living
Tomorrow building in Brussels, you see large signs saying,
“do not fear the future”.
I believe that the future will always have more opportunities
than threats, and that makes us human. We always try to
innovate our way forward. The future looks bright and I
am happy for our children that every day we can work on
innovation to make the world a better place for every one
of us.© Living Tomorrow
© Living Tomorrow