How can you lead innovation with emerging tech trends?

Assessments and crowd sourcing identifying gaps and areas for improvement are helpful and a useful exercise, but can't replace direct customer feedback, watching customers use your product, and work through problems. When Engineers and Designers close this gap, the improved understanding of problems will make for more innovative and precise solutions.

A great example is building in public (BIP). I’m a firm believer that the way forward is to be as transparent as possible and involve your community. It’s one of the key principles behind the entire open source development movement. Some companies open source their code on GitHub to allow others to fork or contribute to the code and improve it. But founders also use platforms that support BIP or simply their social media accounts or blogs to showcase progress, struggles, learnings, and share their successes. It is such a strong and empowering strategy that platforms such as Indie Hackers that enabled BIP we’re acquired by big names such as Stripe.

Focus on problems. Use technology to compensate for weaknesses on your team. For example, if Large Language Models can make everyone artificially skilled at writing, it makes your entire team more capable. It does not matter that that capacity is artificial, just as it did not matter that the invention of writing made Mesopotamian scribes artificially better at remembering business transactions. What matters is that the technology works. Encourage the automation of generic text and a culture of transparency about weaknesses by publicly rewarding those who honestly address their challenges and overcome them with innovation. Your technology should be an extension of your team and an expander of your vision.

In my experience with co-founding Cruz — we reinforced the importance of brainstorming to capture a diverse set of concepts. Sleep on it and return to that list with fresh eyes and perhaps more items to expand the list! Enhance your findings with research from literature and case studies to understand the concepts — and then begin to prototype the feasible ones through journey mapping. Remember that each of you have your strengths — lean in! Take turns playing Devil’s Advocate so you can collect a well-rounded understanding of the concept. Set a 1-2 minute timer and each take turns vocalizing your opinion on the direction your team should take. Be adaptive and flexible with your methods, you will find your way.

Be inspired but don't be limited by what has been done before. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have occurred at such a rapid pace over the past year that it remains in large part unclear what can and cannot be done by new technology. According to Microsoft Research's paper, "Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4" Large Language Models have emergent properties of intelligence far beyond the intentions of their creators (though no will of their own). They can complete such abstract tasks as rendering a drawing of a unicorn in an obscure coding language, despite having no eyes of their own. What else can they do? Experiment, learn, and then succeed.

Dedicated experimentation time, both for individuals and the team, which can be in the form of a competition or a presentation on lessons learned, even if it is thrown away, will generate more innovation. The important part is sharing the learning, as the application can change and the ideas combine.

There is a huge amount of hostility and fear towards Generative AI because workers are concerned that they will lose their jobs and are therefore hesitant to adapt. Encourage change by embracing the message that you are training your workers to show that you value their future. Innovation can not only boost productivity but improve lives, workflow, and individual value as an employee. If your team learns to automate monotonous tasks they gain dynamic, creative skills which make them a greater asset to your workforce (and the workforce in general), not obsolete. At the same time, the volume and quality of your organizational deliverables could improve dramatically, leading to a win for all parties.

I agree, and one thing to consider is that it’s not just new players coming into the markets in terms of what technological enhancements or talents they bring to the table. We always talk about mass adoption (whether Bitcoin, alt currencies or AI) and that involves getting existing players (companies, services, applications, infrastructure) to integrate and adopt emerging infrastructures into their already established ecosystems. Essentially a merger, a hybridization of sorts must occur in order for breakthroughs to essentially become integrated into the norm.

I think also with huge team members we can start with group who have the fast ability to innovate. Then start to publish which will reduce efforts and resistance as there is already a result.

Do not underestimate the importance of dissenting opinions. Every team should have a person who plays the role of ‘Devil’s Advocate’ and challenges the popular opinion. Oftentimes, we fall victim to groupthink and in order to fall in line with the rest of the team’s ideas, we fail to advocate an idea that is opposed to the unanimous consensus.

In my experience, the best way to dive into emerging tech is to simply start using it as a consumer and start building on it as a founder. Using it as a consumer gives you an edge in terms of insights and understanding what the opportunities and the gaps are. Building experimental pretotypes and prototypes on top of it helps you understand the tech itself and its limitations as well as how it meshes into a product. Understanding layers is also important. With any technology, there are layers: whether it is purely improving or broadening the infrastructure or developing additional applications and layers on top of it that make it faster, more secure, more efficient in terms of computing capacity etc.