THE FUTURE INNOVATION TRENDS

Well, this article I wrote last year when I was thinking about some startups ideas.

In May last year (2019), the European Commission released a report named “100 Radical Innovation Breakthrough for the future”. This article summarizes some key points from this 338-page report along with other sources to offer an insight into the newest technology development trends, and to broaden your horizon to think more interdisciplinarily when deciding to create a startup.

PART I: TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION

The crisis of artificial intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has already made a huge impact on our society and economy. People are talking about, and even worrying about the upcoming AI waves. Compared to the traditional “rules-based” technology, this “data-based” AI seems to offer “lazy people” many possibilities to develop their own companies. If you have some ideas which can be realized using AI technologies, don’t hesitate, we recommend you just go ahead and get your hands dirty. There are lots of open sources which can both improve your technical skills and, most importantly, give you knowledge on starting your own company. According to the methodology of “Lean Startups”, which is quite a popular concept in Silicon Valley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_startup). During the process of “start-fail-start-fail-start…” you can train your ability to smell business opportunities in the future.

Going back to AI technology, what exactly is the future of AI? We just talked about how using AI technology to develop products is very useful for improving your business skills. However, AI products are more or less just applications of big data, there is no real intelligence inside the machine. We human beings are still the scientists. So, how we can achieve real AI? For this, we will look into the following point.

From inorganics to organics

It seems that our journey to search for new materials to improve industry efficiency is reaching a dead end. Since scientists have been looking for new breakthroughs, bio-related fields are getting increasingly popular. According to statistics, 33% of innovation breakthroughs have something to do with biology. Several examples include bio-printing, antibiotic susceptibility testing, artificial synapse/brain, bio-electronics, and even using bio-technology for energy harvesting.

Neuroscience is regarded as one of the most potential areas to have destructive innovation in the future of AI. Our brain is divided into cortical and limbic regions, which are responsible for rational thinking and emotional hub respectively. How to generate emotion in robots fascinates a great amount of scientists. Some important functions of emotion can be, for example, achieving the multi-level communication of simplified but high information and helping with decision making etc. However, the difficulty is that the emotion knows no possibilities, namely they don’t weight likelihood.

Increase in applied quantum

In the era of big data, we have to deal with so much information in a single day. How do we improve the efficiency of the processing data? Quantum information is a brand-new solution to solve this problem. Besides, quantum computers and quantum cryptography, to name a couple, are regarded as key technologies to overcome the bottleneck of many technical issues. Despite the wide application of AI technology nowadays, the cornerstone of the scientific world is still the exploration of the essence of the world, which quantum theory plays a significant role contemporarily.

PART II: SOCIAL INNOVATION

Human science does not only describe people but also inscribe people. The 21 century is a digital book, which has brought us a lot of conveniences. At the same time, privacy is being eroded, commerce is flocking into every corner of our lives. Following this mainstream or exploring a new path?

Both ways could benefit your career life. Look into the following trends may trigger some of your thoughts:

• Breakdown of established gatekeepers; (e.g Press industry)
• IP ownership disruption; (e.g. Internet)
• Faintness to privacy protection; (e.g. Body 2.0)
• Boundless of science; Knowledge sharing; (e.g. Open sources)

PART III: SUMMARY

“Entrepreneur” comes from Latin and it means “undertake”, which indicates “Entrepreneur” is the one who keeps “taking into” new things. That is also one of the initials of our alliance — helping to explore new ideas and helping to steer technology towards certain social goals.