Innovation in any field, especially in fast-moving industries like tech or product design, comes with inherent risk—and the potential for great reward. For every game changer like the iPhone there are many more flops like Google Glass.
For Jonathan Brill, entrepreneur and futurist, innovation is finding ways to make old systems do new things. “Innovation is risk-taking,” he says. “You are adding volatility to a system by trying to change it. You are creating a thing that does not exist in the world and trying to do things that will allow it to scale in a sustainable way.”
His book Rogue Waves: Future-Proof Your Organization to Survive and Profit from Radical Change focuses on how to future-proof business, capitalizing on social, technological, and economic trends to turn threats into opportunities. A veteran of the product design and engineering industry, he says that this field of the economy is more likely than many to hunker down against these rogue waves instead of trying to harness their potentially destructive—but also productive—power.
Engineering and manufacturing’s risk-averseness is grounded in the industry’s inherent connection to hardware- and capital-expense–intensive production cycles. Because of high capital expenses at the outset, once the manufacturing process is set, there is a strong incentive to keep the production lines churning at all costs—even costs to future productivity gains that might come by stopping a while to tinker. So how do business owners drive innovation, in an environment designed to be risk averse?
“Updating things doesn’t necessarily generate revenue in pure dollars and cents. It’s a process improvement, and that’s a very difficult sell,” says Andrew Humiston, a CAD designer at Minnesota-based PHS West, which manufactures customizable, motorized endoscopy medical carts. Recently, PHS West has expanded its product offerings to serve the data center industry, designing and building industrial tugs that pull servers off palettes for installation and slot them into place.
