EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS

In the Exponential Innovation Workshop, leaders of the world learn how to turn disruption into opportunity.

The program, which has taken place in over 30 countries, combines a series of lectures and discussions to teach executives about the new paradigms of innovation and competitiveness-and how to thrive in today's era of exponentially advancing technologies. What is enabling this new revolution is computing’s exponential pace of advancement.  Our smartphones now have greater computing power than yesterday's supercomputers.  Every technology that is information-based is advancing on an exponential curve including sensors, artificial intelligence, robotics, synthetic biology, and 3D printing.  These are becoming smaller, faster, and cheaper. 

This workshop teaches people at every level how to prepare for and thrive in a period of great change. In one and two day sessions, we cover the fundamentals of exponential technologies, where and how disruption is occurring, and how to prepare for the changes ahead.  These programs have helped thousands of participants around the world to watch for convergences, anticipate threats, and become leaders of the new industrial revolution.

SPEAKING TOPICS

We live in the most innovative and interesting time in history, with unprecedented opportunities and resources becoming widely available. While economists and politicians argue amongst themselves about whether progress has come to a halt, scientists, designers, and entrepreneurs are building the future not just one advancement at a time, but also in clusters. Nearly every field and part of life are in the midst of experiencing a massive technology-enabled transformation that will only grow over the next two decades, for better or worse.

This change is coming due to technologies advancing exponentially. For more than 100 years, the processing power of computers has doubled every 18 months. Now it has come to the point at which our smartphones are more powerful than yesterday’s supercomputers were. Faster computers are now being used to design faster computers, and computers and the information technology that they enable are absorbing other fields.

This fast-paced presentation explores the progression of technologies and the driving forces behind this acceleration. Tarun will detail advances in fields such as computing, medicine, sensors, artificial intelligence, digital manufacturing, and robotics. He will explain how they’re changing manufacturing, distribution, and virtually every part of how a corporation operates.

We are seeing startups come out of nowhere to disrupt old industries. Note Amazon.com, a technology company, disrupting bookstores; Apple’s shake-up of the music industry; mapping apps on cellphones’ displacement of GPS devices; and Uber’s transformation of the taxi industry. Innovation has globalized; business models and technology developed in one country can easily be exported to another. Companies will need to make bold changes in order to survive in this new era of industry disruption, and that begins with understanding the larger picture of what is going on.

The rapid pace of technological change is creating unprecedented security risks for companies. While every day there seems to be a new story of a corporation that has been hacked, the reality is that we are only at the tip of the iceberg. The cyber attacks of the near future won’t be as much about stealing credit cards and passwords as they will be like the events that took place at Sony Pictures, where an entire enterprise was taken apart in the span of three weeks. Executive emails, employee health information, and industry contracts are all fair game in this new age of security threats.

But not only should we be hyper-aware of threats, we need to also look at the cutting-edge creativity of cyber-criminals who are driving arguably the most innovative models of operation in the world.

In order to prepare for the challenges ahead, executives need to understand what has changed and what they are now responsible for. This intriguing speech will dive into the trends in cyber-security that will take place over the next 5-10 years. From hacked thermostats sending your competitors intelligence to phishing emails so convincing it is hard to know who is really behind the screen, cyber-security is going to become one of the largest obstacles that individuals and corporations will face for success.

That’s because the nature of cybercrime itself is changing, and criminals are often some of the savviest and enthusiastic early adopters. By examining their behavior we can understand the nature of the threat companies will face – and also learn their best practices and how they are able to be so effective.

Tarun engages an important discussion of what corporations can do to position themselves for success and an overview of the most contentious debates in the field. It takes important concepts that everyone in business needs to know but distills the most practical knowledge without getting lost in the technical specifics. Customers, clients, and boards are ultimately holding executives responsible for the security of their company. What they will need to learn is a shift in mindset towards proactive defense rather than the status quo of reactive response.

Drones crash-landing on the White House lawn. Cars driving themselves for millions of miles on public roads. Scientists editing the DNA of embryos to remove diseases. 

These scenarios may sound like science fiction, but they have all already taken place.  As technology continues to advance at an exponential rate and overturn entire industries, it is raising some very serious questions related to how we should live our lives.  Along the way, it is posing grave challenges to our legal and ethical systems, the likes of which we have never experienced before.

It’s far greater than just one type of technology or one area of law that will need to be updated, advances in technologies will undermine all of these systems, on many different fronts at the same time.  By understanding and advancing not only the larger changes taking place, but the greater impact of these developments, individuals and corporations can understand the risks and issues they will have to grapple with in the near future.  The type of disruption that would take centuries and generations to take place now occurs in a matter of months.

This lecture will commence with an overview of how advances in information technologies like data storage, processing, and analytics are leading to a revolution in robotics, artificial intelligence, and connected hardware that will lead to massive opportunities while at the same time causing great upheaval.   Going technology by technology, Tarun will explain how these new systems, applications, and business models will need to be dealt with in order to maximize their upside while limiting their potential downside.