Enterprise Garage Newsletter | September 17th, 2016
The Silicon Valley gives, the Silicon Valley takes
"If you don't wanna work, you won't get money! That's how it is!" A conservative European politician on a visit touring Silicon Valley brought that up during one of the discussion. And that comment has been a valid opinion for the past 200 years, when the industrial revolution had begun and with that ideologies such as Marxism, communism and capitalism stood opposite each other.
What the politician on his visit missed was that there is now something happening that will put that 200-year-old argument into question. A study by the Oxford University sees 47% of all jobs going away within the next two decades. And we are not talking about relatively low qualified jobs such as truck or taxi drivers. We are talking about highly qualified jobs with long education requirements, high salaries and reputaion such as lawyers, doctors, software programmers, and fighter pilots. Machines are better, faster, more precise, and do not tire. The exponential development of AI-systems and robots will replace many of these professions soon and not offer alternative jobs for the humans.
Those people want to work, but there won't be jobs in their professions anymore. For society and politics this means to begin a conversation on what's coming and what our answers are. Some discussions are being started from the most unlikely place on basic income: Silicon Valley. Because most of these disruptions come from here. When the most capitalistic and innovative place in the world hints that we should think about basic income, then we should shed our ideologies from the 19th century and find answers from the 21st for the 21st century.
BTW: some new jobs that give you an impression of where shit is going: Airbus has those two job postings for the development of autonomous electric planes. I kid you not!
Want to learn more about how Silicon Valley does it?
Get my book on Amazon! 400 pages, €19,99.
When preparation is bad
The most dangerous delegations visiting Silicon Valley are the ones that come prepared. Yes, not the ones coming unprepared, but those who prepared too much. Reading TechCrunch, Mashable and Wired and their local news on Silicon Valley gives them the impression that they 'got Silicon Valley'. So when they finally arrive their expectations are to get those impressions confirmed, maybe some surprising little insight, but at the end of each meeting there is a take-away and concrete steps that can be taken and ideally a Silicon-Valley-style blueprint that can be applied to their endeavours.
Boy are they in for a surprise. Within two to four days of resistance - often accompanied by anger that they are not getting what they seemingly paid for - the very same participants realize that what they really get is a fundamental challenge to their belief-system. The interaction with Silicon Valley people makes them question their own motives, their original assumptions, everything that they had faith in. Once they realize that their resistance stops and they finally arrived and are open for a deeper interaction with innovation and Silicon Valley. After almost 30 tours with delegations from 40+ countries we can say with certainty that people need to trust us more. This scenario has played out multiple times by now. Participants will get way more than what they paid for, but they won't get what they think they are entitled to and expected. And exactly this is where the magic happens. More about our next tours a bit later.
Our upcoming innovation event on October 3rd is sold out! 100 registrations and 12 speakers will be giving an overview of Silicon Valley activities. This event is hosted to welcome and network Austria's new consul and economic attachée to SF.
One of the speakers has a crowdfunding campaign running that is about millet. The Millet Project: Where Have All the Grains Gone? is aiming to reintroduce this grain back to the US in order to ensure grain diversity. Read more and donate at the campaign website from UC Berkeley.
The first stage of designing new products or services is to have a hypothesis of what the problem could be, but then of course validate that with customers in the empathy phase. This phase will be revelatory and shake your core thinking.
In that spirit I want to call out to companies with over 10 employees that want to participate in such a design thinking process with a friend's startup. My friend's startup offers an English language learning solution for professional development and she is aiming at creating an enterprise version of that app. if you are interested, please PING ME. This would be really appreciated.
To experience yourself what the Silicon Valley does right about innovation and what the latest trends are, join our Silicon Valley Inspiration Tours that give you multi-day deep dives into the San Francisco Bay Area. See more tour details here. Here is also a list of preparatory steps for your visit.
SUBSCRIBE TO MY NEWSLETTER.
READ MY PAST NEWSLETTERS HERE.
NSFW - Forging a Sword
Today's NSFW - internet lingo for Not Safe For Work - is revealing the wonder of birthing a sword. A sword master student myself it's fascinating to see the steps of how from a block of iron ore a Dandao Sword is forged by these blacksmiths and craftsmen and masterfully used by a sword master.
