When I was a kid, we begged for empty tin cans and binder’s twine.  We threaded the binder’s twine through holes in the bottom of two cans, tied knots in each end to hold the cans, waxed the twine (sometimes 100 feet of it) with beeswax, stretched it tight and talked to each other from opposite sides of the barn.  If we stretched tight enough we were pretty sure we could actually hear each other when one of us talked into one can and the other listened through the other can at the right time.

Today, I made a purchase through the Express line at the Apple Store.  No cash register, no receipt, just a swipe of my credit card and the receipt showed up instantly in my email which in my case was on the Blackberry in my pocket.  Who Would’ve Thunk It?

In 1975 Dean William Tate, in his 40th year as Dean of Men at the University of Georgia, gave a speech to the Intrafraternity Council National meeting in San Francisco.  In Tate’s speech which was entitled “If Moses Visited Grandma Tate,” he postulated that had Moses returned to the North Georgia mountains in the late 19th century to visit his Grandmother, he would have understood pretty much everything but the phosphorus match.  Moses would have understood the systems of transportation and communication, the fire, the cooking, the agriculture.  However Tate explained that were his grandmother to visit him in 1975, she would understand nothing.  Not the car, the airplane, the telephone, the radio, the TV, nothing.  He explained that had he as a little boy told his grandpappy that one day the family would sit around after dinner watching a box attached to the wall with full color moving pictures and sound showing people doing things 1,000 miles away at exactly the moment they were doing them, his grandpappy would have said, “That little Bill is a nice boy, but I believe he is ‘tetched in the head.”

Dean Tate who retired in 1977 would understand even less if he visited me today.  His point in 1975 was that the rate of change had reached a point where we could no longer educate ourselves for the specific world in which we were going to live. He recommended basic education; reading, writing, listening, speaking, thinking.  Not such bad advice I think.

My point is that the rate of innovation is accelerating, and how do we adapt our methods of new product development?  For instance, we have a software client where not a week passes that some new and significant competitive innovation is not announced.

In a world where innovation happens so fast, how does one skate to where the puck is going to be?  How does one market research a future need that users cannot imagine?  I would love to have your thoughts and feedback on this issue.