This article is the first in our innovation flywheel series. Future articles will dive deeper into the mechanics of fully scaling the flywheel approach at the enterprise level, with specific focuses on technological and platform evolution, organization and team design, governance, funding, and change management. The pandemic has put the power of digital on full display. Since February 2020, we've witnessed a full-on global embrace of the digital lifestyle. By some estimates, the percentage of grocery shopping conducted online tripled in 2020, the time spent streaming video entertainment jumped by more than 40%, and videoconferencing skyrocketed by over 110%. We've also seen perhaps the most sudden, sharp, and dramatic behavior shift in history with the near-universal adoption of remote and digital work.

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" -Peter Thiel The closing quarter of the twentieth century was peak tech innovation in the United States. AT&T's Bell Labs invented the information age with the transistor and data networking, and many transformative technologies tangential to its core business: from solar cells to the Unix operating system to lasers.1 Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) brought about human-computer interaction with the initial computer mouse, as well as laser printing and Ethernet networking.2 In the 80's Pixar was born, creating the first ever computer-animated sequence in a feature film with novel computer-generated imagery (CGI).3,4 At the same time Gates and Allen were hacking at something special that soon revolutionized computing, as were Wozniak and Jobs.5,6 Amidst the heyday of invention in the world of bits, the "space race" brought about massive innovation and accomplishments in the world of atoms: government competition between the US and Russia put humans on the moon for the first time.

"We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" -Peter Thiel The closing quarter of the twentieth century was peak tech innovation in the United States. AT&T's Bell Labs invented the information age with the transistor and data networking, and many transformative technologies tangential to its core business: from solar cells to the Unix operating system to lasers.1 Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) brought about human-computer interaction with the initial computer mouse, as well as laser printing and Ethernet networking.2 In the 80's Pixar was born, creating the first ever computer-animated sequence in a feature film with novel computer-generated imagery (CGI).3,4 At the same time Gates and Allen were hacking at something special that soon revolutionized computing, as were Wozniak and Jobs.5,6 Amidst the heyday of invention in the world of bits, the "space race" brought about massive innovation and accomplishments in the world of atoms: government competition between the US and Russia put humans on the moon for the first time.