In 1959, a physicist named Richard Fyenman took the stage at CalTech for the annual meeting of the American Physical Society. A short bit into his presentation, he asked a transformative question.


He theorized that making things smaller could and SHOULD have a significant impact on the world. He asked important questions that in many ways set the multi-disciplinary trajectory that we’ve been on over the past 55 years.

On making computers smaller, Fyenman expanded:





And, so with that, nanotechnology was effectively born.

Today, we DO have computers who can recognize faces, or voices, and/or other biometric footprints. We are also making headway on computers who can think on their own. (see the latest on deep learning)

Not only have computers with magical powers themselves become smaller (and will continue to do so), but our understanding of the world has become ever more granular.

In no other place is this becoming more apparent than in our understanding of the human body, and specifically the human brain. The rapidly advancing fields of neuroscience, genomics, and optogenetics are allowing us to understand things that were inconceivable just 10 years ago. They are allowing us unprecedented visibility to the brain “sources of emotions, memory, and consciousness for the first time”.

But, this understanding isn’t just limited to the field of medicine. Google Maps continues to provide more granular details about the physical world.

Behavioral tracking via smart meters, GPS navigation systems, sensors of all kinds, wearables, thermostats, video cameras, ceiling fans, and all other sorts of devices allow us to connect the dots of every action into a larger narrative of what’s happening. The feedback loops are getting shorter and more accurate.


“When Our Neurons are Connected to the Net”

“Exploring New Frontiers of Real Time Customer Feedback”

Micro Participation

But, we’re not just understanding the world in a deeper and more microscopic level that we ever have before. We’re also able to participate in ever narrowing snippets of activity. Prior to the creation of Mechanical Turk (or CrowdFlower, Clickworker, CloudCrowd and dozens of smaller crowdsourcing platforms), the friction associated with finding, hiring, training, evaluating, paying, and firing an employee was significant. Not so much anymore.


(There is an entirely separate conversation around what this means for the future of work and institutional models, but we’ll need to save that for another day.)

Decoupling of capabilities and offers is becoming more common place, as consumers increasingly desire it.

Good Lord!!!! It’s true – Chris Rock (aka Cheap Pete) can finally get what he’s asking for. (one of my favorite In Living Colour skits by the way).

Instead of buying, or even committing to long term leases, cars, games, movies, office space are increasingly available in ever shorter time increments.

While other technology vendors seek to bundle increasingly large capabilities into a common platform, Zoho has created lots of micro-applications that are easily consumable for a fraction of the price as individual stand-alones.

Based on some estimates, each Facebook like is worth about $.03. However, in the structure of the network economy, scaling $.03 lots of times across the globe adds up to billions.

Even entire business models are even built on extracting fractions of pennies from millisecond scale network inefficiencies in financial markets.

The implications of modularizing everything down into small micro-offerings is evolving the way that commerce is done, allowing for more robust and complex models of value exchange.

And the devices keep getting smaller too. Tiny robots the size of insects can now fly. A slew of exploratory instruments keep getting smaller, like this high resolution endoscope that is no larger than the size of a human hair.

The questions that Richard Fyenman were asking have been answered. His vision is being rendered before our eyes. So what does all of this mean?

1. Just like a scientist, we have the ability to understand more about our world. In the context of corporations, it means having the ability to ask better and more difficult questions about our customers, our employees, our partners, and our entire supply chain. These questions can likely only be answered through new instrumentation, and new information systems to gather, analyze,and present this information to us.

2. Our customers are living in the same reality. Generally speaking, they are highly interested in reducing the friction around consuming your products and services (when and how they want them). They’d rather pay $1 for exactly what they need, than $5 for lots of capabilities that they can’t immediately leverage. Distribution channels for just about everything are evolving. Payment systems, new devices, advances in logistics capabilities, evolving consumer behavior are rapidly evolving what’s possible, and customers have shown a great propensity to adjust rapidly.

3. Connecting points 1 and 2 above are where the greatest work is to be done. Institutionalizing the methods for gathering greater customer understanding, while building the core competencies and infrastructure to support rapidly evolving go to market strategies is where great opportunity and challenges exist. Spend your time envisioning and executing towards these ends.

This post is brought to you by InnovateThink and Cisco.


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