#151 - Steve Brown, Founder of Possibility & Purpose - On 6 ways Technology can help companies innovate out of a downturn

This podcast interview focuses on a discussion around the essence of the book ‘The Innovation Ultimatum – how 6 technologies reshape every business in the 2020s. My guest is Steve Brown, Author and Founder of Possibility & Purpose.

Steve Brown is a futurist, author, entrepreneur, and advisor with over 30 years of experience in high tech. Prior to building his own consulting business, he was Intel’s Chief Evangelist and worked in Intel Labs as a futurist, where he imagined and built plans for a world 5, 10, and 15 years in the future.

After leaving Intel in 2016, Steve built his own company, Possibility and Purpose LLC, which helps businesses to be more innovative, more resilient, and more profitable.

In 2018, he co-founded The Provenance Chain Network, an open standards approach to bringing transparency to global commerce.

In 2020, he published his latest book, 'The Innovation Ultimatum: How six strategic technologies will reshape every business in the 2020s'

This inspired me, and hence I invited Steve to my podcast. We explore why the gap between those that embrace the new technologies and those that don’t is going to dramatically widen. Why it’s about agency taking responsibility and deciding you’re going to participate in building the future that defines the winners. We also address what qualities leaders are required to develop to lead and be remarkable in doing so.

Here are some of his quotes:

There are two pieces to the innovation ultimatum, there's one that's sort of more obvious on the surface, which is the competitive imperative, which is kind of the stick

The gap between those that embrace technology, and those that don't, has always been there, but that gap is going to widen dramatically in the next decade

The other side of the innovation ultimatum is the moral obligation for us as individuals and as companies to do the right thing and to create value for humans and to solve human problems.

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. That you should ask yourself two questions: "What's the future we want to build?" and "What's the future we want to avoid?".
2. That to be great a leader in the 2020s, you should be equipped to ask the right questions, become very clear-eyed, and understand the application of these technologies
3. Why the smartest companies are thinking five or six steps ahead and then they work their way back to a starting point.
4. That too much of the ‘innovation’ we put out is still about boosting productivity and efficiency, and that in doing so, we’re leaving so much on the table that we risk irrelevancy.

For more information about the guest from this week:

• Steve Brown
• Website