How to be truly innovative? Let’s take a look back into the greatest technological innovations of all times. The machine based manufacturing, followed by the steam power, the internal combustion engine and finally the electrical power generation. All of them promoted the Industrial Revolution in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Every single human in the world was touched by this revolution and with this, the history of humanity changed. As Harold Perkin observed, “the Industrial Revolution was no mere sequence of changes in industrial techniques and production, but a social revolution with social causes as well as profound social effects”. Why did the Industrial Revolution happen that way? Why was it truly innovative? Well, there was the influence of great thinkers at that time such as Alan Smith, Diderot, Voltaire and Marx, among many others, who embraced and promoted the idea of mankind’s progress, and the society was eager to see the tangible manifestation of such knowledge waves seen before since the Reformation or the Scientific Revolution (14th century).

The only way to achieve the so desired progress was to understand that strong ideas that work isolated are not strong enough, and that even ordinary ideas integrated into a whole can be collectively powerful. This way, the Industrial Revolution offered a platform of broad capabilities for continuous development. An empowerment platform where companies, industries and organizations could create more and more products and seek for sustained growth by selling those to us.

It was only a matter of time for this growth to reach new levels that would change again the history of humanity: the Internet. It all started in the governments and universities with particular interests on retrieving documentation. Their interests and a combination of ideas from hobbyists, scientists and industries made the internet possible the way we know it. A platform where even contradicting ideas could exist and where the capabilities for continuous development seemed broader as ever before; democratizing knowledge and transgressing geographic frontiers to reach other people and their information… a whole new world where not only companies and governments but also you and me, and everybody could be actively part of. I don’t have to tell you the rest because you are witnessing it everyday, but I can say that Internet is potentially the ultimate technological innovation capable to create more platforms to express, to learn and to understand and shape ourselves and our world.

Now, the tangible is just an element in a system of value where the connections, virtual or real are the focus of attention.

So, what we can see is that both the Industrial Revolution and now the Internet are platforms with apparently unlimited ambitions. Both set suitable conditions and systems that enhance our capabilities and gives us resources in a particular environment. Both socially pulled and with many elements conforming a meaningful whole, but with the difference that in the Industrial Revolution the atoms (the tangible) were the subject of most value and therefore the focus of our attention. Now, the tangible is just an element in a system of value where the connections, virtual or real are the focus of attention. So far, the platform of internet has allowed an ever growing digital representation of our world, our dreams and fears, our right and wrong… and it still has even bigger ambitions. For instance, Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica, is in the quest of making all knowledge computational and developed a search engine called WolframAlpha which has the goal of modeling and explaining the physics underlying the universe. This may sound a bit too much, but it shows that there are great ambitions to retrieve and manipulate information and knowledge in better, ubiquitous, real-time and mobile ways, and this can only be done on top of proper platforms. With these improvements new systems and new connections of Internet to-and-within the real-world are foreseen.

The connection of bits and atoms is the beginning of a platform to empower real things in the world that couldn’t interact before with us, they are called Meta Products. But this can be also a bit tricky; it is very easy to fall into the product-narrowed vision, because that was the way old platforms from the Industrial Revolution used to work, but if you just focus on the product, you might render gadgets that will not be relevant in people’s lives. But if you think in new platforms, you’ll reflect on the systems that compose them, their connections and you’ll be able to see the big picture. By looking at the overall service environment and its interactions (platforms and their systems) rather than just focusing on the isolated output (product) we can understand the contexts, the main actors and the real drivers of innovation.