Why the Rewards for Ambitious Problem Solving Are About to Get Bigger

In recent years, we’ve come to associate the practice of innovation with speed and agility, but accomplishments that truly move the needle can’t be achieved quickly or through mere iteration. We need to set our sights higher. One reason for the emphasis on agility and iteration in recent decades is that technology has been fairly stable. For example, every new generation of computer chips has offered more power and capability but works exactly like earlier generations. Today, though, those comfortable old paradigms are reaching their limits. They’ll be replaced with technologies that are new and aren’t nearly as well understood. That means that, in the coming years, we are likely to see a new era of innovation that will look more like the 1950s and 1960s (which were about solving fundamental problems, like space flight and the development of mainframe computers) than it will the 1990s or 2000s (which were more about improving on earlier technology to create applications). That will require greater focus on sustaining efforts to solve grand challenges.