How Innovation Happens and How People Perceive It

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Every major invention had some sort of fear around it. People thought that teddy bears were a social menace, an aiter and an abetter of race suicide. Business men tried to stop answering machines from disrupting the way business was done. It's interesting to look several decades or even centuries back and see people had the same fears about very different technologies.

What do airplanes, railroads, and jazz music have in common? They were all innovations that people feared.

In fact, if you look into any key technology shift from the past, you'll find a wealth of fear, uncertainty, and doubt surrounding it. And while this shouldn't be surprising, we can still learn from the skeptics of the past.

We can learn just how difficult it is to predict what's to come and look toward our future with a humble perspective, an acceptance that we probably will get it wrong again.

In this episode, Calvin and Steph talk through how people viewed inventions seemingly as innocuous as the bicycle or teddy bear, what we can learn from these stories, and how to stay open minded and capitalize on opportunities as technology takes us into the future.