Innovations & Inspirations

This April 2 in New York City, I will be giving a talk at TEDxTeen, with the especially timely theme, “The Age of How.” As the program notes, with every passing day, we become more connected with the rest of the world, access to technology becomes greater, and knowledge transfer becomes easier and easier.  Every generation is able to take the learnings and best practices of the previous generation more quickly than ever before, and build upon them.

Yet still, age-old problems – cancer, Alzheimer’s, pollution, unsafe water, poverty, war, religious and ethnic tensions – have remained problems for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. It requires “new age thinking” to effectively tackle them.

I will be talking about escaping the “innovator’s myopia,” highlighting how we should think about problems if we truly want to create disruptive change rather than merely bandage up their symptoms.  I am hoping that this will inspire “new age innovation,” led by a generation that, for the first time in history, has the world’s knowledge perennially at its fingertips.