Institute For The Future

Key Characteristics of Lightweight Innovation

In 2007, the Institute for the Future forecast on lightweight infrastructure introduced a set of characteristics common in the design of emerging technical systems. When we look for lightweight innovation, we are more concerned with the characteristics of organizations and processes of innovation than the physical objects and networks of infrastructure. But many of the key characteristics of lightweight infrastructure are useful in recognizing lightweight innovation.

 

KEY CHARACTERISTICS OF LIGHTWEIGHT INNOVATION

Think of these characteristics not as a checklist of minimum requirements, but as lenses that focus our attention on the assumptions that will shape the future of innovation. While today, we see these characteristics most clearly in technology and business innovations on the web, over the next decade these characteristics will inspire innovation in many other sectors.

• Ad hoc response to immediate needs - Lightweight innovation often arises from the need to solve unexpected problems rapidly, often in crisis. This allows for early engagement with end-users and extended “beta” periods of testing, evaluation, and refinement. (e.g. Disaster information sharing systems  like Sahana and Ushahidi)
• New scale-altering tools and materials - Leverages new technologies that reduce the scale at which functions become economical or mobilize functions that used to be fixed. This allows new ideas to be rapidly prototyped, reducing risk from proof-of-concept experiments and allowing early focus on business model development. (e.g. Agile web development using Ruby on Rails or Django)
• Network scalability of all component activities - Traditional R&D groups scale by growing bigger, lightweight innovation systems scale by engaging resources in a network. More than open innovation, lightweight processes distribute most or all of the work of innovation. (e.g. API ecosystems like Twitter's)
• Modularity and mashups - The web is rapidly evolving into a set of software modules that can be quickly and easily interconnected. This era of what economist Hal Varian calls “combinatorial innovation” allows for constant evolution of mashups that combine the capabilities of many different pieces of intellectual property – both code and content. (e.g. Real-time notification protocols like Pubsubhubbub)
• Open standards  - Open innovation traditionally focuses on the idea sourcing part of innovation for large organizations. But standards help spread openness throughout the entire R&D process, improving transparency. (e.g. Open mobile ecosystems like Android and iPhone)
• Multiple actors - Traditional R&D is managed through hierarchical management structures. Lightweight innovation systems rely more heavily on peer-to-peer models that emphasize cooperation over coercion. (e.g. Open source software  like Linux and Apache)

 

DRIVERS OF LIGHTWEIGHT INNOVATION: NEW DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGIES

 

The shift to lightweight innovation will be fuelled by technologies that rewrite the pace, scale and choreography of research and development. These seven areas of technology will have the greatest impact on large research organizations over the next decade.

• Cloud Computing - Cloud computing allows lightweight innovation groups to outsource non-core support functions and rapidly scale infrastructure for successful experiments. Beyond the web industry, it will render on-demand supercomputer-based modeling and simulation more accessible – this will make it possible to rapidly iterate simulated product and service designs in silico. (e.g. Amazon EC2, Eucalyptus)
• Agile Web Frameworks - New frameworks for quickly building data-rich web applications support so-called “agile” development models that dispense with traditional product planning protocols. From a core idea, quickly developed prototypes can be tested on a daily basis, as the underlying code is standardized and modularized – allowing one part of a system to be changed while the overall service remains in operation. (e.g. Rails Rumble, Django)
• Open Hardware - The models of open source licensing and collaborative development pioneered in software over the last decade will increasingly be applied to hardware. The free exchange of schematics, bills of materials and logic designs will accelerate and expand innovation in hardware design, manufacturing and application. (e.g. Accenture's partnership with Bug Labs , Chumby, programmable logic arrays / system-on-a-chip)
• Combinatorial Manufacturing - A host of technologies for programming matter will drive a broad shift from manufacturing to growing objects, one layer or molecule at a time. Much like low-cost laser printing jumpstarted the desktop publishing revolution, these technologies will “unleash a wave of small-scale manufacturing innovation.”  (e.g. Micro-manufacturing, 3-d printing)
• Social idea and innovation management  - Open innovation strategies embrace the sourcing of ideas from outside traditional R&D organizations. However, collaborative platforms will allow management of the entire innovation process as a distributed network—from idea to evaluation to implementation. (e.g. BrightIdea.com, InnoCentive@Work)
• Ubiquitous sensing - Every sensory data stream is a potential site for lightweight innovation. As the kinds and number of sensors proliferate in places, on people and even inside us, the lightweight model of rapid, user-engaged prototyping of niche applications will allow us to discover novel uses. Mining these data sets on a large-scale will revolutionize our understanding of human behavior. (e.g. Pachube)
• Desktop biotechnology - For the most part, the pharmaceutical industry has been a countercurrent to lightweight innovation – R&D is becoming more capital-intensive, lengthy and centralized. But the falling cost and complexity of biotechnology tools and “source code” have the potential to unlock roadblocks in life sciences, by empowering a wave of “garage biotech” innovation, akin to the shift in the computer industry that followed the introduction of personal computers. (e.g. Macromolecule microarrays, DIYbio.org, BioBricks)