Networks accelerate innovation

Networks accelerate innovation

Let’s start by stating the obvious:

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Since COVID kicked, everything has gone digital at a much faster rate than ever anticipated.

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Jobs, events, sports games. 

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Even family reunions are happening via Zoom!

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Many of us are sick of this digital isolation. 

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We’re craving the real life human connection that our brains are wired for. 

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But, there is some upside to this accelerated digitization. 

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Here’s the thing:

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Networks accelerate innovation. The bigger the network, the faster the innovation. 

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Our digital networks are tools that allow minds to connect with other minds, exchange ideas, and spark invention. 

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In my book Abundance with Peter Diamandis, I explored how the rise of the coffeehouse in eighteenth-century Europe became a critical driver of the Enlightenment. 

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These egalitarian establishments drew people from all walks of life, allowing novel notions to meet and mingle. 

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Coffee shops became hubs for information sharing. 

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They became crucial networks that played a foundational role in driving progress forward. 

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Not surprisingly, we see similar network effects in cities, which are essentially coffee shops writ large. 

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Two-thirds of all growth takes place in urban environments because population density leads to the cross-pollination of ideas. 

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This is why Santa Fe Institute physicist Geoffrey West discovered that doubling the size of a city produces a 15 percent increase in income, wealth, and innovation (as measured by the number of new patents). 

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But just as the coffeehouse pales in comparison to the city; so does the city pale in comparison to the globe. 

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In 2010, roughly one-quarter of the Earth’s population, some 1.8 billion people, were connected to the internet. 

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By 2017, that penetration had reached 3.8 billion people, or about half the globe. 

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And over the next half-dozen years, we are going to wire up the rest of humanity, adding 4.2 billion new minds to the global conversation. 

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Soon, all eight billion of us, every single human, will be networked together at gigabit speeds.

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If network size, density, and fluidity have turned cities into the best transformation engines we’ve yet managed to create…

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Then the fact that we are about to link the entire globe into a single network means the whole planet is just a few years away from becoming the largest innovation lab in history.

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Think of this process as steps in a mathematical equation, an algorithm designed (in a sense by all of us) to increase the rate of change in the world and the scale of its impact. 

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Each step acts upon every other, each one amping up the next, all of them together accelerating our acceleration, producing more change in a year than our grandparents experienced in a lifetime.

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The upside of this COVID induced digital isolation is that it’s accelerating the speed at which the whole planet becomes one giant connected network. 

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The result?

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More game changing innovation, sooner. 

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P.S. If you want to grow your network with people who are into flow, check out our flagship Peak Performance training program, Zero To Dangerous. Details inside here.

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