We Are Entering A New Era Of Innovation. Here's What We Need To Do:

There’s no doubt that digital technology has been highly disruptive. In industry after industry, from retail to media to travel and hospitality, nimble digital upstarts have set established industries on their head, completely changing the basis upon which firms compete. Many incumbents haven’t survived. Many others are greatly diminished. Still, in many ways, the digital revolution has been a huge disappointment. Besides the meager productivity gains, we’ve seen a ​​global rise in authoritarian populism, stagnant wages, reduced productivity growth and weaker competitive markets, not to mention an anxiety epidemic, increased obesity and, at least in the US, decreased life expectancy. We can—and must—do better. We can learn from the mistakes we made during the digital revolution and shift our mindset from disrupting markets to tackling grand challenges. This new era of innovation will give us the ability to shape the world around us like never before, at a molecular level and achieve incredible things. Yet we can’t just leave our destiny to the whims of market and technological forces. We must actually choose the outcomes we prefer and build strategies to achieve them. The possibilities that we will unlock from new computing architectures, synthetic biology, advanced materials science, artificial intelligence and other things will give us that power. What we do with it is up to us.