Innovation is an economic game changer, and the most profound innovations can change the game so much that enormous economic activity and wealth is generated. This is why the smarter developed nations chase innovation so hard, with large investments in education, research and development, setting the stage for spontaneous innovation that then needs to be commercialized to reap the benefits.
The following is a highly subjective list of the most profound innovations that have occurred in just the information technology space since the 1970s that have changed the game so profoundly that we, as consumers, just couldn’t cope anymore without them.
The microcomputer. HP was the first to fit a computer on a desk in the early 1970s, followed by the Wang 2200 in 1973, the IBM 5100 in 1975, the Apple I, the TRS 80 and others. Into the 1980s computers were developed for household use, with software for personal productivity, programming and games. For the game changer, I pick the Commodore 64 for opening up the mass market and selling 17 million units, making it the bestselling single personal computer model of all time.
Database software. It’s hard to believe that early computers relied on cumbersome “flat file” storage for decades. Database management systems, first navigational, then relational, then object-oriented, allowed random access to data. Profound. Early breakthroughs were the Codasyl approach, and IBM’s IMS, but I consider the breakthrough to be IBMer Edgar Codd’s work, which eventually became SQL, though this will be challenged by Oracle fans.
The mouse. Early computers used punch cards and keyboards. The mouse really enabled interaction with a computer screen. The trackball was invented by scientists working on the Royal Canadian Navy’s DATAR project in 1952. All kinds of point, push and touch devices now enable us to “drive” our electronic devices, but the game-changing moment was Apple’s blockbuster 1984 Superbowl TV ad for the new Macintosh showing a mouse user wearing a driving glove.
The PDA. The “personal digital device” has morphed into the ubiquitous “smartphone” with annual sales of 150 million units. Cellular communication technology emerged from Bell Labs showed up first in vehicle-based phones, then gave us the Palm, the Apple Newton, the Nokia Communicator and the BlackBerry, among others. I say the Motorola “brick” was the game changer – the first popular handheld mobile phone.
Fibre optic cable. For 100 years, we pushed electrons down copper wire. Then came fibre optic cable, and that changed everything. Unimaginable amounts of data move every second through a world totally connected by these thin strands of glass. Transmission of light through glass was first demonstrated in Paris in the 1840s, and even Alexander Bell played with it. However, the game changer was Charles Kao’s work at Britain’s STC much later where he discovered the right material to use for communications fibres: silica glass with high purity. This discovery earned Kao the Nobel Prize in physics in 2009.
The Internet. It started out as ARPANET, a U.S. military project, and the first interconnections to it were UCLA and Stanford in 1969, followed by UC Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. Today, hundreds of millions of us use it every day.
Web search engine. The first simple search tool was Archie, created by computer science students at McGill University in 1990, followed by Gopher from the University of Minnesota in 1991. Simple tools grew into search engines, and there have been dozens of them, including AltaVista, Yahoo, Excite, Inktomi, Yandex and MSN Search (Bing). We just can’t seem to get enough search. Though a latecomer in 1998, Google is the game changer because, despite competition, it gained a search market share of more than 80% – a stunning achievement in this market.
Social networking. Social networks using information technology go back to ARPANET and LISTSERV, and include America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, Friendster, MySpace. However, as a game changer, Facebook probably represents the largest shareholder value ever created in the shortest amount of time, from the smallest pre-launch investment. It happened because Mark Zuckerberg built a more addictive way for people to socialize electronically. He might be more of a human behaviourist than a technology entrepreneur.
So what’s the point of this history lesson?
B.C. is blessed in so many ways. We can sell our natural gas, we can mine metals and minerals, we can sell logs to China, we can catch or grow fish in our tidal waters, and perhaps build more ships for the military.
However, none of these pursuits comes close to generating the economic leverage that any of the above innovations has achieved.
We have the talent, the educational institutions, the research infrastructure and a location that clearly attracts intellectual capital from all over the world. We have chronically underused our innovation and commercialization capacity compared with, say, Israel, and we continue to do so at our peril.
The rest of this century will prove to us that simply harvesting our abundant natural resources alone will not build the economic future and a high standard of living for a population that will double here before the end of the century.
