The Deviant's Advantage by Ryan Mathews

Author:Ryan Mathews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781400047291
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2002-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

THE BOTTOM LINE FOR BUSINESS

There are five basic take-aways business should consider when evaluating the devox’s impact on science:

1. Scientifically based business opportunities will continue to present themselves faster than they can be properly evaluated. That is, after all, what happens when you dance with the devox. But every great Saturday night is followed by a sobering Sunday morning, and we have to understand that the downside of radical innovation—particularly biological innovation—gone wrong could be catastrophic.

2. That said, it’s critical that every business do its best to try to stay on the cutting edge of science. Even if you’re making something as relatively prosaic as soap, you can’t afford to overlook developments in biology that could either improve your product beyond your wildest imaginings or render it obsolete.

3. Over the next two or three decades the combined impact of research in the physical, life, and computational sciences will significantly touch the lives of everyone you work with. At the very least, the effective working life of most Americans—and presumably most citizens of what in a pre-PC world used to be called the developed world—will be extended significantly. We’re futurists, not mystics, so we can’t be sure what this means, but unless Wal-Mart expands exponentially, creating a chronic need for greeters, we think there might be a growing pool of unemployed and underemployed people.

4. We know some of our discussion of science might have seemed a bit esoteric. But remember, historically science in general, and technology in particular, used to help business better serve markets. Today science and technology are increasingly creating markets. And, as in the case of biotech and even the Internet, these can grow to multibillion-dollar markets well before their commercial viability has been established or we know how to fully control or exploit them.

5. Finally, all this new science is bound to create an opportunity for unemployed philosophers since most scaled businesses will have to wrestle with the ethical impact of scientific and technological development. In the future, a company’s ethical position may become even more important than its balance sheet.

In the next chapter we want to throw out some quick “short takes” on the devox’s impact on a few other subjects in order to show that we didn’t just select models we could easily manipulate to prove our point.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.